A humanoid robotic hand performing the sign language motions

In this paper, studies have been made in five for the purpose of realization of the robot hand that is capable of conveying feelings and sensitivities by finger movement. First, a small-sized and light-weight robot hand was developed to be used as the humanoid according to the concept of extracting required minimum motor functions and mounting them to the robot. Second, basic characteristics of movements were checked by experiments, simple feedforward control mechanism was designed based on speed control, and a system capable of tracking joint time-series change command with arbitrary shape was realized. Third, tracking performances with regard to sinusoidal input with different frequencies were studied for evaluation of the system thus realized, and space- and time-related accuracy were investigated. Fourth, finger character movements by signal language were generated as examples of information transmission by finger movements. A series of results thus obtained indicated that this robot hand is capable of transmitting information promptly with comparatively high accuracy through movements. Finally, the remote control was enabled through data glove with regressive model obtained by the singular value decomposition.