Abstract
Magic is a performance unique to humans that makes use of hand's skills to its maximum extent. It needs enormous efforts to acquire the skills of magic for a skillful man. In this study, a robot hand that can handle a small object in the palm and perform coin magic making full use of its palm and fingers. It is said that the coin magic is one of the most difficult kinds of magic. Therefore, we expect that a robot that can do coin magic may be able to do any magic successfully. In this paper, a mechanism of the robot hand is studied and the control methods of handling coins for the magic is discussed. The robot is assumed to use a Japanese 500 yen coin during the performance and it is assumed that the robot controls the hand by using only the information from the palm sensors. It is the problem how to design the skilful hand, how to construct a control algorithm, and what sensors should be used to sense the state variables of the coin.
