Development of a Five-finered hand for Estimating the Gripped State by Proximity and Force Sensation on the Side of Fingers and Hand-holding with Human

Abstract

Hand is a typical site of contact with the external world, so robotic hands with various functions have been studied. In this paper, we focused on hand-holding between human and robot. We proposes a five-fingered robotic hand that joins hands with people depending on the state of hand-holding. Using proximity and force sensors mounted on the sides of the fingers, the robot hand estimates how to be gripped by a person and holds their hand back in the same way as human. When the person relaxes their hand, the robot hand opens its fingers and terminates hand-holding. We conducted an experiment to apply this hand to robot guidance and confirmed that the state of the finger’s sides is important to distinguish between different hand-holding ways.