An assistive tele-operated anthropomorphic robot hand: Osaka City University Hand II

This paper presents an anthropomorphic robot hand called Osaka-City-University-Hand II, which is an improved version of Osaka-City-University-Hand I. The cosmetic and the function of our proposed hand allow us to use the hand as a prosthetic hand in addition to as an open platform of robot hands for robotics research. Distributed tactile and force sensors are appended to the OCU-Hand II as a feedback system in order to grasp an object firmly. A new control strategy is to be adopted, in which a master light-weight glove is to be used to drive the OCU-Hand II as a slave. In the tele-operating task, arithmetic operations are to be done to the outputs of the feedback sensors in order to increase the resolution of the master-slave driving technique as well as to overcome the hardware amplification defects. In order to use OCU-Hand II as a helper equipment, a novel and unique assistive mode is included within master-slave control strategy, where the OCU-Hand II is assisting and helping its operators in order to reduce the load on the operator and perform the usual operations in a better manner or even faster than the usual. During the assistive mode the operator is enabled to perform different tasks other than the master-slave driving while he is still putting on the master-glove.