Pinching at Fingertips for Humanoid Robot Hand

Abstract

Delicate actions such as picking up paper or a nee[1]dle with the fingertips – an important function for robot hands – are extremely difficult. We propose a lightweight robot hand based on extracting minimum required motor functions and implementing them in a robot. We also propose a robot hand that realizes ap[1]propriate pinching by adding the minimum required degree of supplementary freedom realizable only me[1]chanically. In the robot hand, we focus mainly on adding degrees of freedom for independent finger mo[1]tion to the terminal joints and a degree of freedom for twisting by the thumb. The results showed that pro[1]viding the fingertip with a joint with broad force con[1]trol even with weak force effectively ensures delicate fingertip control in a humanoid robot hand.