Universal Robot Hand Equipped with Tactile and Joint Torque Sensors: Development and Experiments on Stiffness Control and Object Recognition

Hiroyuki NAKAMOTO, Futoshi KOBAYASHI, Nobuaki IMAMURA, Hidenori SHIRASAWA, Fumio KOJIMA

Various humanoid robots have been developed and multifunction robot hands which are able to attach those robots like human hand is needed. But a useful robot hand has not been depeveloped, because there are a lot of problems such as control method of many degrees of freedom and processing method of enormous sensor outputs. Realizing such robot hand, we have developed five-finger robot hand. In this paper, the detailed structure of developed robot hand is described. The robot hand we developed has five fingers of multi-joint that is equipped with joint torque sensors and tactile sensors. We report experimental results of a stiffness control with the developed robot hand. Those results show that it is possible to change the stiffness of joints. Moreover we propose an object recognition method with the tactile sensor. The validity of that method is assured by experimental results.

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