Abstract
Tactile sensors are necessary for robotic hand to achieve manipulation under complex environment, such as we often exploit the inner surface even on our hand/finger joints to manipulate edgy objects (e.g. a string). Unfortunately, conventional robotic hands/fingers have no tactile sensors on the hand/finger joints because of limitation of their mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism of robotic finger which eases implementation of tactile sensors on the joints; i.e. it allows us to implement tactile sensors seamlessly on the finger surface. We experiment our finger mechanism and show its capability of sensing an edgy object; it is sufficient to be used for manipulation.
