Control of a robot hand emulating human's hand-over motion

초록

In medical and household applications, it is necessary to consider the hand-over of an object between a human and a robot. In this paper, a physiological method motivated by the study of human hands is discussed for a robot to grasp an object or release a grasped object stably without using an object model as a man does. A human's grasping behavior is analyzed by measuring the grasp and friction forces simultaneously as a man grasps an experimental device which is designed for grasping or hand-over. The human controls the grasp force by sensing the friction force, that is, the weight of the object which is felt on his hand, but when the slip is detected by sensing skin acceleration, the grasp force becomes much greater than the minimum force required for grasping by adding the force which is proportional to the acceleration. And two methods that can predict when and how fingers will slip upon a grasped object are discussed. The experimental results show the smooth hand-over of an object between a man and a robot hand. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.