Superiority of pinching force accuracy augmented by exoskeletal support system

This paper introduces superiority of pinching force accuracy and band when our developed pinching force support system augments a human´s pinching force, allowing direct contact of human fingers and fixing distribution ratio of the supporting force. A user with our exoskeleton support system adjusts his/her pinching force according to a task based on his/her sensory feedback information that is made available by a direct contact with a pinching object. In addition to the direct contact, the exoskeleton pushes a user´s finger with a constant rate of supporting force for reduction of the affecting force on the human finger, and then the rest of the supporting force directly acts on the pinching object. In contrast, most of conventional gripping assistive robots interfere with haptic sense of a user finger and with stable and dexterous manipulation based on the tactile sense because they covers a user´s fingers with their exoskeleton. Through some experiments, this paper reports that our exoskeleton achieves high precision and wide band of the pinching force, comparing with the human performance and with performance of different structure of the exoskeletons.