抄録
This paper describes a development of a light duty arm with an active-fingertip gripper for handling discoid objects. The system is potentially capable of sharing a workspace with human workers, assuming the use in a cell manufacturing system. We propose a new 3-DOF gripper mechanism with two fingers which symmetrically move in parallel and each finger has a 2-DOF fingertip of a cylindrical shape. We also develop a lightweight arm with a weight compensation mechanism which is composed of a non-circular pulley and a spring to minimize required actuator torque. After verification of basic performance, the hand-arm system successfully performs a pick-and-place task for a discoid object from horizontal placement to vertical placement and vice versa. We evaluated the positional error tolerance of the discoid object through hardware experiments. The results suggest that the developed hand-arm system has sufficient performance to achieve repetetive pick-and-place tasks where its cycle time almost equals to a human worker.
