• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.1497-1502
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• 2012

To manufacture a robot hand that essentially mimics the functions of a human hand, it is necessary to develop flexible actuators and sensors. In this study, we propose the design, manufacture, and performance verification of flexible actuators and sensors based on Electro Active Polymer (EAP). EAP is fabricated as a type of film, and it moves with changes in the voltage because of contraction and expansion in the polymer film. Furthermore, if a force is applied to an EAP film, its thickness and effective area change, and therefore, the capacitance also changes. By using this mechanism, we produce capacitive actuators and sensors. In this study, we propose an EAP-based capacitive sensor and evaluate its use as a robot hand sensor.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.568-577
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• 2000

In this paper for an object grasped by a robot hand to work in stiffness control domain we first investigate the number of fingers for successful stiffness modulation in the object operational space. Next we propose a new compliance control method for robot hands which consist of two steps. RIFDS(Resolved Inter-Finger Decoupling Solver) is to decompose the desired compliance characteristic specified in the op-erational space into the compliance characteristic in the fingertip space without inter-finger coupling and RIJDS(Resolved Inter-Joint Decoupling Solver) is to decompose the fingertip space without inter-finger coupling and RIJDS(Resolved inter-Joint Decoupling Solver) is to decompose the compliance characteristic in the finger-tip space into the compliance characteristic given in the joint space without inter-joint coupling. Based on the analysis results the finger structure should be biominetic in the sense that either kniematic redundancy or force redundancy are required to implement the proposed compliance control scheme, Five-bar fingered robot hands are used as an illustrative example to implement the proposed compliance control method. To show the effectiveness of the proposed compliance control method simulations are performed for two-fingered and three-fingered robot hands.