Development of a Force-sensible Robot Hand with Photoelastic Links

—Improvement of Stress Distribution Analysis and Its Evaluation—

Abstract

In order to realize high-level force control, detailed force information is indispensable. Therefore, we focused on photoelasticity, which enables us to obtain stress distribution at the pixel level of a polarization camera. In this study, we developed a robot hand with the fingers and palm mostly made of photoelastic material in order to obtain the stress distribution of the entire material with high spatial resolution. We used a polarization camera that can capture polarization images in four directions simultaneously, and performed image-based stress analysis. The experimental results showed that force distribution can be measured and the measured resultant forces were in good correspondence with those measured by a conventional force sensor.