Abstract
This paper describes a design and a manufacture of a right hand for an anthropomorphic violin-playing robot. Our previous robot tightly holds a bow at the tip of the right arm, which seems to be not suitable for absorbing undesirable vibrations. Therefore, we built a new right hand, which has five fingers. Each finger except the thumb has four DOFs. The thumb is fixed in this paper. Because it is not feasible to install such active elements as actuators, we installed coil helical torsion springs with various spring constants as passive elements. We tested whether the hand can produce sounds without dropping the bow in various finger postures. Also, we investigated how much the force can be applied to the bow in various finger postures. The hand can withstand 160 gf of the force applied at the 300 mm distance from the tip of the bow, which is equivalent to the relatively weak or middle bow force at the center of the bow.
