Development of fast-response master-slave system using high-speed non-contact 3D sensing and high-speed robot hand

In this paper we focus on master-slave robot hand systems that can realize non-contact sensing and intuitive mapping between human hand motion and robot hand motion. Such a master-slave robot hand system can be effective from a viewpoint of usability. However, conventional systems are not able to adapt to dynamically changing environments because they have high latency from input to output. Therefore, we developed a fast-response master-slave robot hand system using a high-speed vision system and a high-speed robot hand. The latency of the proposed system is so small that humans cannot recognize it. The motion of a human hand is obtained with high-speed non-contact 3D sensing, and this motion is mapped to a high-speed robot hand, while taking account of structural differences between the human hand and the robot hand. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed system through experiments.