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Today, various industrial robots are developed and used all over the world. However, these industrial robots are specialized in particular operations. In fact, one industrial robot is not able to be designed for operating various tasks. One of the causes is that general-purpose and multifunctional robot hands substituted human manual-handling task are not brought to realization. If these robot hands like human hands are consummated, the applicable field of industrial robots is extended, and the utilization efficiency is improved very much.

A human hand has mechanical handling function such as grab, grip, pinch, push and pull. In addition, it can sense the feeling such as configuration, hard, flexible, smoothness and asperity. In other words, a human hand is a multifunctional and a universal end effector. Many research works on robot hand have been studied all over the world in order to imitate human hand and achieve the similar function to human hand. However, it is not attained that a robot hand system has the coordinative function to human hand's one yet. For resolving this problem, it is necessity that software system processes various sensors' information effectively. Additionally, it is also necessity that hardware system has drive mechanism, multi Degrees Of Freedom (DOFs) linkage mechanism and some sensors that allocated in limited spatial restrictions. Consequently, we produced the Universal Robot Hand I as shown in Fig.1. The robot hand system has tactile sensors, joint torque sensors, joint angle sensors and the similar structure to human hand's one. We have studied on the robot hand's mechanism, the sensory information processing and the kinematic control.

Fig. 1. Universal robot hand I

Development of Multi-Fingered Universal Robot Hand withTorque Limiter Mechanism 99

Fig. 3. Multi-axis force/torque sensor (BL AUTOTEC, LTD.) and array-type tactile sensor

according to these data.

Fig. 4. Control system for universal robot hand

The overview of the control system for this robot hand is shown in Fig. 4. This control computer gets the pulse from the encoders in every motor, the value from multi-axis force/torque sensors in every fingertip and the pressure distribution from the array-type tactile sensors on every finger pad. The fingers are controlled through driver circuits

In this paper, a new robot hand is developed on resulting knowledge for advancing our study. Universal Robot Hand II has actuators, transmission gears, reduction gears, and Torque Limiter Mechanisms in the fingers. Using the Torque Limiter Mechanisms, the fingers can sustain overload not by the gears but by the structure. This is the imitative behavior of a human finger. This paper describes that new small robot hand mechanism has five fingers at the first. At the second, this Torque Limiter Mechanism is introduced. At the third, the effects of Torque Limiter Mechanism are verified in experiments. At the last, results of these experiments are summarized and concluded.
