An intelligent control of robot hand with four fingers

An integrated force and tactile sensor with embedded electronics has been presented in a lightweight flexible hand with 13 D.O.F, and the associated visual feedback control. The sensor consists of a three components commercial force sensor and of a custom matrix tactile sensor based pressure sensitive conductive rubber. The joint used of both tactile and force information allows the direct solution of the point contact problem. A technique to compute the contact centroid and a quadratic approximation of the pressure distribution during contact has been proposed. Ongoing work is focusing on a flexible manipulation system, which consists of a dual flexible multi-fingered hand-arm system, and a dual active vision system. In the future this new hand-arm system will be used for multi tasks. The need for a robotic hand that works in the real world is growing. And such a system should be able to adapt to changes in environment. We think that the concept of a flexible hand system with real-time control implementation will become an important issue in robotic research.