Development of an Anthropomorphic Multi-Fingered Hand and Experiments on Grasping Unknown Objects by Groping.

This paper addresses the development of at three-fingered anthropomorphic hand and discusses a strategy for grasping unknown objects by groping. In the former part of the paper, the design of the developed robot hand is presented. The robot hand has a thumb, an index finger and a middle finger with a total of nine degrees-of-freedom. The location of thumb is designed considering the opposability seen in a human hand. Eighty-seven touch sensors are distributed over the palm and fingers of this hand. In the latter part of this paper, a strategy for grasping unknown objects by groping, using the devoloped hand, is discussed. Groping is a kind of "active sensing". When the system does not have any models available for the objects to be grasped, active sensing becomes inevitable. The aim of the groping is to find at grasping configuration for the unknown objects. A ball, a can, a cone, at rectangular cube, and cube are chosen as the unknown objects in the experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of the strategy for grasping unknown objects. This strategy needs neither models of the objects nor any complicated computations, and therefore, is useful especially for tasks in the real world.