Many thanks to Loh Ken Chen for constructing the hardware of this gripper, and to Staffordshire University Film Production Dept for the video.
This gripper was run as a final year project for mechatronic degree students at Staffordshire University. It consists of five RC servo motors pulling wire inside each finger. The fingers are constructed so they tighten their grip when the wire is pulled. The servos are interfaced to a PC using a servo driver board from Milford Instruments. A Virtual Reality Dataglove from 5DT was interfaced to the same PC. A program was run on this PC that translated the finger position from the 5DT glove to servo commands on the servo driver board. This resulted in a realistic motion of the robotic hand and, since the 5DT glove was wireless, formed the first basis of a tele-operation project. However, the hand in the dataglove has no feedback of what the robotic hand is touching, and the robotic hand has no sensors to feedback when it has grasped something. A project to equip strain sensors on the robot hand is ongoing.
Here is a video of the hand in action: