Pressure control on whole surface of human-mimetic multi-fingered hand with tactile sensing

Abstract

As a work of human-symbiotic humanoid robot which can support human activities in daily life environment, we focused on tracking task with free-form surface which appears in giving bed-bath care to human and polishing complicated shaped furniture. In such cases, research issues are how to establish the contact by the whole surface and how to control the pressure exerting at each segment in the hand through the finger-arm coordinated motion. In this paper we proposed pressure control method on the whole surface of the human-mimetic multi-fingered hand with the tactile sensing. Passive compliance control algorithm for the contact at fingers and hybrid control algorithm with palm posture adjustment compose our control method. Our control method can achieve the adjustment to the curvature and local concavities and convexities of human body. By actual experiments using anthropomorphic humanoid robot TWENDY-ONE, we validated the effectiveness of this control method.