Design and Control of a multi-fingered Robot Hand

4) Design and Control of a multi-fingered Robot Hand

          

             Figure 9: A three-fingered dexterous robot hand

Although there have been a lot of previous researches on the robotic hand mechanism, a few of them can be used in practical applications. The major design objectives of robot hand are 1) compact size, light weight mechanism 2) an integrated system should be compact 3) capability of grasping various target objects such as blocks, cylinders, thin objects. Figure 9 shows a prototype. The KIST hand is 4DOF, and it weighs 1.2kg and 2.3kg of continuous fingertip force, which satisfies practical needs. A compact force sensor is implemented in order to measure contact force and distance. From the experiments, it was verified that the robot hand is useful for stable grasping of various target objects. In addition, a object shape detection was successfully tested by using finger motions combined with force sensor information. It can be applied to detect doorknob shape and exact position when we want to open a door in a dark room. Currently, we are trying to develop new finger mechanism in order to achieve stable power grasp by appropriate design of a closed kinematic chain.