Control of Grasp Forces for Robotic Hands Based on Human Capabilities

인간의 손의 능력을 응용한 로봇 핸드의 힘 제어

This paper discusses a physiological approach motivated by the study of human hands for robot hand force control. It begins with an analysis of the human's grasping behavior to see how humans determine the grasp forces. The human controls the grasp force by sensing the friction force, that is, the weight of the object which is felt on his hand, but when slip is detected by sensing skin acceleration, the grasp force becomes much greater than the minimum force required for grasping by adding the force which is proportional to the acceleration. And two methods that can predict when and how fingers will slip upon a grasped object are considered. To emulate the human's capabilities, we propose a method for determination of as grasp force, which uses the change in the friction force. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be applied to control of robot hands to grasp objects of arbitrary weight stably without skin-like slip sensors.