Robot hand for handling cloth

A robot hand to handle cloth has been developed. In the study described, the authors tried to pick up a piece of cloth from a stack of cloth, to transport it and to set it at a stated position by means of a robot hand. The robot hand has two fingers and is attached to a small industrial robot arm. The hand can measure the height of a target´s surface when the hand touches the surface. And the hand picks up a piece of cloth after checking whether its thickness is nearly equal to one piece´s thickness. After the hand picks up a piece of cloth, the hand can set it without an exchange of holding postures even on a vertical surface basically. The hand itself is a thickness and touch sensor. In the experiment that the prototype of the robot hand placed a piece of cloth on a slant, the mean value of a slipped distance was within 3 mm, and position reproducibility was within 1 mm.<>