Robot hand fingertip design validation

Abstract

Among the challenges in designing robot hand is to make it feature packed but still maintaining a compact human-hand sized without compromising its robustness. The previous work had elaborated the design process of a three-fingered robot hand until a functioning prototype is successfully produced. However, the performance of the robot hand for grasping was insufficient. This paper will discuss the enhancement in the existing design to incorporate force sensing ability with better grip-ability of the fingertip. The improved design fingertip was fabricated using rapid prototyping machine. Then, two miniature load cells were fitted into the fingertip to enable force sensing in two directions namely x-axis and z-axis. The fingertip maintains the easy-to-replace feature, improving the tip surface for better grasping and creating canal-shaped gap to have a compliant-like material effect when the fingertip is subjected to any external force. From the calibration result, it can be observed that the measured force is linearly related to the applied force in both x and z axes to prove the feasibility of the proposed design.