Development of electromagnet brake robot finger for highly dexterous motion through a single motor

In this paper, a novel braking mechanism is proposed to enhance the dexterity of the robot finger through a single motor. The proposed braking mechanism has very simple structure, which consists of a brake shoe and an electromagnet switch per each joint. The electromagnet switch gives a brake shoe a trigger signal for brake, the brake shoe plays an important role to induce a large braking force/torque for a joint. In order to provide the design criteria of the brake shoe, we derive the brake condition based on the static analysis of the proposed mechanism, and it is numerically analyzed to determine the geometric shape of the brake shoe. Through the experiment, the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is also verified.