Teleoperation of Universal Robot Hand with Pinching Force Stabilization

The multi-fingered robot hand has much attention in various fields. Many robot hands have been proposed so far. We have also developed a small and five-fingered robot hand in order to carry out various tasks and the robot hand teleoperation system in order to utilize the human help. However, the operator cannot pinch and manipulate an object with complicated shapes stably because the operator cannot feel the pinching force when the robot hand pinches and manipulates the object in the teleoperation system. In this paper, we propose a pinching force stabilization method in the robot hand teleoperation system. Here, the operator does not teleoperate all robot fingers directly, but a part of fingers are autonomously controlled in order to stabilize the pinching force. The effectiveness of the proposed pinching force stabilization method are verified through some pinching experiments with various shapes.