Grasping control of flexible hand with thirteen D.O.Fs

The increasing requirement for robotic applications in dynamic unstructured environments is motivating the need for dextrous end-effectors which have the wide variety of tasks and objects encountered in these environments. The human hand is a very complex grasping tool that can handle objects of different sizes and shapes. Many research activities have been carried out to develop artificial robot hands with capabilities similar to the human hand. In this paper we present an experimental performance for the validation of a robotic hand gripper for industrial applications. In particular this researches focus on the compatibility of the gripper with the Fara robot arm, developed by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. This hand gripper is the wide working space compared with its physical dimensions and the capability to deal with objects in working environment conditions. This capability is achieved by using force/torque sensor and by properly controlling and coordinating the gripper and the carrying arm. After a brief illustration on the main features of the gripper, the experimental activity is presented and the results achieved are discussed. This system also aims to substitute the astronauts in periodical operations with a semi-autonomous robotic device. Note that with this control structure, it is also very simple to connect the arm/gripper system using Internet to other computational resources or robotic devices, for example to emulate tele-operation tasks.