Abstract
One of the issues for the soft robot hand is to measure the contact information that includes external force on the fingertip and corresponding finger posture. This paper aims to obtain the contact information without sensors on the fingertips, finger joints, and palm. Wefocus on the passivity of the McKibben pneumatic actuator in which the pressure is passively changed according to the external force. Experimental result with physical robot finger driven by the pneumatic actuator shows that the contact information can be estimated utilizing the approximation of the relationship between the pressure and the information. Considering that the pressure sensor can be attached outside the hand, the sensor-less robot hand that estimaes the contact information is realized.
