A Highly Adaptable Flexible Soft Glove Consisting of Multimode Deformable Soft Finger

This work presents a novel highly adaptable flexible soft glove composed of multimode deformable three-jointed soft fingers. The soft fingers are assembled by soft actuators and plastic materials that can be driven and controlled with single Degree of Freedom (DOF). A variety of different soft actuators are used as joint drive components to meet the motion requirements of fingers under different working conditions. We established a theoretical model to describe the deflection of the soft actuators based on reciprocal theorems. In addition, the finite-element method (FEM) was used to simulate the curvature change of the soft actuator and the soft finger, the soft actuators theoretical and simulation results were verified by experiments, and the multimode deformable soft fingers were simulated by FEM. Finally, a five-finger soft rehabilitation glove was prototyped and presented experimentally where the flexibility and functionality endowed by the soft fingers were demonstrated and highlighted. The versatility was also showcased in the applications.