Professor Dongwon Yoon of DGIST Decorates Cover of Renowned International Journal with 'Robot Hand' Research...

DGIST announced on the 14th that the research team led by Professor Dongwon Yoon of the Department of Robotics and Mechanical-Electronic Engineering has had their core technology research achievements on a ‘Robot Hand’ that is as precise and flexible as a human hand featured on the cover of the 10th anniversary issue of the world-renowned international robotics journal, Soft Robotics.

The cover paper is selected based on highly influential research achievements and serves as an official recognition of the excellence of the research results. This issue is the 10th anniversary publication of Soft Robotics, making it even more significant that domestic research results were chosen for the cover of the anniversary edition.

Professor Dongwon Yoon, DGIST

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Professor Dongwon Yoon’s research team at DGIST’s Department of Robotics and Mechanical-Electronic Engineering conducted research in 2021 on a ‘Robot Hand’ that is as precise as a human hand.

The ‘Robot Hand’ is mainly used for advanced tasks such as gripping or assembling objects of various shapes and stiffness in multiple industrial fields.

For such precise robot hand actuation, rolling bearing-based ball bearing rotary joints are primarily used; however, they are expensive, difficult to assemble, prone to failure from external shocks, and can damage objects. Therefore, various flexible joints have been developed as alternatives.

In response, Professor Yoon’s team reinforced the weak stiffness of existing flexible structure robot hands by applying four flexible hinges per finger joint, each shaped to fit the finger joint, arranged in two pairs crossing in an X shape. This demonstrated a 46.7% higher shock absorption compared to conventional bearing-based robot hands.

They also confirmed that this design enables more reliable gripping of various irregularly shaped objects. It was verified that the robot hand overcomes the low payload limitation of existing soft robots, capable of gripping objects weighing up to 4 kg.

Cover of a renowned academic journal featuring Professor Undongwon's paper on 'Robot Hand'.

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Professor Dongwon Yoon said, “I am very pleased that the research results published in 2021 were selected as the cover paper for the 10th anniversary issue of the top journal in the soft robotics field among excellent research results worldwide,” and added, “We are striving to commercialize this technology in industrial sites and the service robot sector.”

This research was conducted with Junmo Yang, a combined master’s and doctoral student in the Robotics major at DGIST, and Jeongseok Kim, a master’s graduate, as co-first authors, supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Early Career Research Program.

The related research was published online in the Soft Robotics journal in 2021 and officially published in 2022.

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