Development of Multi-fingered Hand for Life-size Humanoid Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a development of multi-fingered hand, which is modularized and can be attached to life-size humanoid robots. The developed hand has four fingers with 17 joints, which consist of 13 active joints and 4 linked joints. A miniaturized 6-axes force sensor is newly developed and is mounted on each fingertip for improving the manipulability. A main node controller with I/O, motor drivers, and amplifiers for 6-axes force sensors are also newly developed. These components are equipped in the hand for modularization. The developed hand is designed so as to realize about 8 [N] forces on the pad point of stretched finger, supposing transmission efficiency of drive system is 55%. In this paper, the mechanisms and specifications of hand module, electrical system, and fundamental experimental results are also introduced.