Abstract - A five-fingered robot hand having almost an equal number of DOF to the human hand is eveloped. The robot hand is driven by a unique method using ultrasonic motors and elastic lements. The method makes use of restoring force as driving power in grasping objects, which enables the hand to perform stable and compliant grasping motion without power supply. In addition, all the components are placed inside the hand because the ultrasonic motors have characteristics of high torque at low speed and compact size. Applying the driving method to a multi-DOF mechanism, a five-fingered robot hand is designed. The robot hand has twenty joints and DOF. It is almost equal in size to the hand of an average grown-up man. The robot hand is produced, and control experiments are conducted. As a result, the potential of the
robot hand is confirmed. Index Terms –Robot hand,
CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, design, implementation and control experiments of a five-fingered robot hand that has measurement, shape and DOF equivalent to human hands is mentioned. Our robot hand has advantages over other robot hands in terms of DOF and weight, thus it can be said that our robot hand is highly sophisticated as an end effecter for human operation. For future works, improvement of reliability, mounting to a robot arm and implementation of tactile sensors are considered. In addition, we will apply this hand for a variety of uses including tele-operation in a master-slave system.