Force holding control of a finger using piezoelectric actuators

A theoretical and experimental study is presented for the force holding control of a miniature robotic ringer which is driven by a pair of piezoelectric unimorph cells. In the theoretical analysis, one finger is modeled as a flexible cantilever with a tactile force sensor at the tip and the mate of the finger is a solid beam supposed with sufficient stiffness. Further, the force sensor is modeled by a one-degree-of-freedom, mass-spring system and the output of sensor is then described by the sensor stiffness multiplied by the relative displacement. The problem investigated in this paper is that two typical holding tasks of the human finger are picked up and applied to the robotic finger. One is the work holding a stationary object with a prescribed, time-varying force and the other one is to keep the contacted force constant even if the object is in motion. The simple PID feedback control scheme is used to control the minute gripping force of order 0.01 Newton. It is shown both experimentally and theoretically that the artificial finger with the piezoelectric actuator works well in the minute force holding of the tiny object.