Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Team Received IMechE Best Student Design Award 2023/24
A team of three Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students received the Best Student Design Award 2023-2024 of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) Hong Kong Branch for their final year design project on “A Cable-Driven Bionic Robotic Hand Design, Manufacturing, and Control”. Supervised by Prof. DUAN Molong, the team comprises KONG Chun-Wai, LAI Chun-Hin and Esther WUN Ga-Yun. Lai Chun-Hin represented the team to attend the award ceremony and receive the award at the IMechE Hong Kong Branch’s annual dinner on May 9, 2024.
About the project:
The Cable-Driven Bionic Robotic Hand Design, Manufacturing, and Control project aims to create a more affordable and functional robotic hand solution. Robotics hands have been a popular topic in medical, service robot, and industrial automation fields, but existing technologies often have setbacks such as being heavy, bulky, limited in realism, and expensive.
To address these limitations, the project team has adopted a bionic-inspired design with 12 degrees of freedom. This allows the robotic hand to reproduce a wide range of natural human hand movements like gripping and pinching, while keeping the weight and cost down. The project utilizes a cable-driven method and readily available materials to optimize the design, resulting in a robotic hand that costs around HK$4,500 and weighs approximately 2.5kg. This balanced approach aims to make this technology more accessible and functional compared to existing solutions.
About The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) (https://hkust.edu.hk/) is a world-class research intensive university that focuses on science, technology and business as well as humanities and social science. HKUST offers an international campus, and a holistic and interdisciplinary pedagogy to nurture well-rounded graduates with global vision, a strong entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking. Over 80% of our research work were rated “Internationally excellent” or “world leading” in the Research Assessment Exercise 2020 of Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee. We were ranked 3rd in Times Higher Education’s Young University Rankings 2022, and our graduates were ranked 23rd worldwide and among the best from universities from Asia in Global Employability University Ranking and Survey 2021.
