2P1-D37 Analysis of Origami Manipulation and its Realization by a Robotic Hand

Abstract

Dexterous robotic hands like human hand have been anticipated in various applications. Although many robot hands have been developed, their dexterity is still far below the human hand. As a steppingstone to a dexterous robotic hand, we developed a robotic hand which manipulates origami. Existing origami robot can perform only simple folding. We aimed to develop a robot that can perform more complicated fold like squash-fold. In this paper, we first analyze origami manipulation and define the difficulty of origami manipulations. We then designed a robotic mechanism that can make a origami work "Tadpole" based on the observation of origami folding by a human. Although the appearance of the developed robotic hand is dissimilar to human hand, we succeeded in performing each element task of "Tadpole" by the developed robotic hand.