GTac-Gripper: A Reconfigurable Under-Actuated Four-Fingered Robotic Gripper With Tactile Sensing

摘要

Humans can use different grasping poses and forces for everyday objects of different shapes and sizes. Grasping and manipulating everyday objects have been longstanding challenges in robotics. Performing multiple grasping configurations is difficult for robotic end-effectors with limited degrees of freedom (DOF). Integrating tactile sensing into robotic grippers will facilitate grasping and manipulating a wider range of objects. In this letter, we present a robotic gripper with a reconfigurable mechanism and tactile sensors (GTac) integrated into the fingers and palm. Each finger consists of two phalanges with a 2 DOF underactuated design and a metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint. Our gripper with four adaptive fingers can perform 5 grasping configurations and obtain 228 tactile feedback signals (normal and shear forces) at 150 Hz. Our results show that the gripper can grasp various everyday objects and achieve in-hand manipulation including translation and rotation with closed-loop control. In the YCB benchmark assessment, the gripper achieved a score of 93% (round objects), 0% (flat objects), 78% (tools), 90% (articulated objects), and 65% in total This research provides a new hardware design and could be beneficial to various robotic applications in the domestic and industrial fields.