Force Sensation Transmission with Same-Structured Master-Slave Robot Hands using Flexible Actuators

Abstract

Human feels reaction force when she/he touches environments. Such sensation is necessary for the human especially in accurate operations. A bilateral control system is one of remote control systems and makes it possible to transmit force sensation between operators and environments. A robot hand is a candidate of interfaces for the bilateral control system because it is applicable to variety of fields. Generally, the robot hands have different structures in master-slave robots and tend to be bigger and heavier due to their actuators. These problems deteriorate performance and operationality of the robot hands. In this paper, two types of novel master-slave robot hands were proposed to achieve transmission of clear force sensation in grasping and manipulation. It is easy to design the control system for proposed robot hands because they have the same structures both in the master and the slave robots. Moreover, thrust wires are utilized to solve the over weight problem by placing the motors away from the end-effectors. Thus, it makes the robot hands lighter and placed away from the motors. The performance of the proposed robot hands are evaluated by experiments.