Development of an anthropomorphic robot hand aimed at practical use for wide service robot application

This paper describes an anthropomorphic robot hand and its experiments. The robot Hand is a very complicated system composed of a large number of joints. Also, there are limitations of size and weight in the development of the robot hand. Because of these reasons, to manufacture an useful robot hand is a difficult work. Our final goal is a development of a robot hand for practical use in wide service robot application. Firstly, we define several requirements of a robot hand in the sense of structure and function. Although it is difficult to satisfy all of the requirements, we try to develop a robot hand including those. The developed robot hand has 4 full-actuated fingers with total 16 joints. By using of DC motor and spur gears as an actuator unit, the size, weight and cost of the robot hand becomes reasonable. A control of finger is conducted with only geometrical information of fingers without any force sensing. In order to verify performance of the hand, various results of experiments, grasping of unknown rigid and non-rigid object, are presented. In addition, experimental results of grasping under disturbances are also presented.