Abstract
We have proposed robot hands that can be assembled inside the abdominal cavity to grasp/manipulate large internal organs and developed a hand that has an ultrasound probe on its fingertip. This paper shows a fingertip for contact sensing with the ultrasound probe. Gel pieces with metal markers on its top and bottom surfaces are attached to the fingertips of the hand. The positions of the markers can be obtained by getting a B mode image with the ultrasound probe. When an organ makes contact with the gel piece, the positions of the markers on the image shift. We conducted experiment for verifying contact sensing utilizing the method.
