Dexterous anthropomorphic robot hand with distributed tactile sensor: Gifu hand II

This paper presents an anthropomorphic robot hand called the Gifu hand II, which has a thumb and four fingers, all the joints of which are driven by servomotors built into the fingers and the palm. The thumb has four joints with four-degrees-of-freedom (DOF); the other fingers have four joints with 3-DOF; and two axes of the joints near the palm cross orthogonally at one point, as is the case in the human hand. The Gifu hand II can be equipped with six-axes force sensor at each fingertip and a developed distributed tactile sensor with 624 detecting points on its surface. The design concepts and the specifications of the Gifu hand II, the basic characteristics of the tactile sensor, and the pressure distributions at the time of object grasping are described and discussed herein. Our results demonstrate that the Gifu hand II has a high potential to perform dexterous object manipulations like the human hand.