抄録
Since three-axis tactile sensing has good advantages on grasping an object of unknown mass and hardness, we developed a multi-fingered robotic hand equipped with a hemispherical three-axis tactile sensor on the fingertips. A controller and a tactile processing system for the robotic hand are developed to implement distributed processing and communicate tactile information using TCP/IP protocol. The algorithm of the controller decides the fingertip velocity on the basis of variation in sharing force and normal force increment: the variation in sharing force is used as information for judgment of touching or slippage; the normal force increment is used as information for recognition of the object hardness. To evaluate the algorithm, we conducted a series of experiments, in which the robotic hand grasped same size blocks of aluminum, Styrofoam, and soft paper. As a result of the experiments, the robot succeeded in grasping these objects possessing various kinds of hardness and yield force.
