Advances in Engineering Advances in Engineering features breaking research judged by Advances in Engineering advisory team to be of key importance in the Engineering field. Papers are selected from over 10,000 published each week from most peer reviewed journals.
Autonomous Robots, 2014, Volume 36, Issue 1-2, pp 67-78.
Ryuta Ozawa, Kazunori Hashirii, Yohtaro Yoshimura, Michinori Moriya, Hiroaki Kobayashi.
Department of Robotics, Ritsumeikan University, 1-1-1 Noji-higashi, Kusatsu, Shiga , 535-8577, Japan and
Research & Development Division, Nabel Co., Ltd., Kyoto, Japan and
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Tokyo, Japan and
Construction Machinery Engineering Department, Kubota Corporation, Osaka, Japan and
Department of Mechanical Engineering Informatics, Meiji University, 1-1-1 Higashi-Mita, Tama, Kawasaki, Kanagawa , 214-8571, Japan.
Abstract
This paper presents a design of a three-fingered robotic hand driven by active and passive tendons and proposes control methods for this hand. The tendon-driven robotic hand consists of the thumb, the index and the middle fingers. The robotic thumb can move all the joints independently. In contrast, the index and the middle robotic fingers are under-actuated using the combination of active and passive tendons, and move the terminal two joints synchronously, which is one of the important features of the human digits. We present passivity-based impedance and force controllers for tendon-driven robotic fingers and discuss how to combine them for fast and secure grasps. We experimentally validate that the robotic hand moves fast and manipulates an object and demonstrate that the robotic hand grasps objects in diverse ways.
Additional information:
The middle and index fingers are underactuated mechanisms that have less control degrees of freedoms than the number of the joints. The fingers were designed based on the analysis of the base vectors. Recently, the analysis was generalized to designing arbitrary joint constraint motions. This method simplifies the design process.
The robotic hand can manipulate an object using the developed controllers. However, in practice, we need to prepare the higher level controller for appropriately choose one of them suitable to a situation. One of the solutions to the higher level controller is a supervisory control system that is frequently used for teleoperation.
The information of the design process and the teloperated application can be seen in the following URL.
URL: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/se/~ryuta/kenkyu/kenkyu_e.html
