Human Friendly Mechatronics

Masaharu Takano, Eiji Arai, Tatsuo Arai

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780444506498
• eBook ISBN: 9780080534190
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Intelligenza artificiale (IA) e semantica

The book includes 61 selected papers from 106 presented at the second International Conference on Machine Automation (ICMA2000). The conference focused, for the first time, on human friendly mechantronics which covers machine systems interacting with human beings, psychological, physiological, and physical behaviors of the human being itself, robotics, human-mimetic mechanical systems, commercial application examples and so on. Machine automation has owed a lot to mechatronics technology in the last decades, however, a paradigm shift is desired and emphasized in the 21st century in every aspect of our society, and mechantronics is not an exception. The paradigm shift in mechatronics is a pursuit of productivity and efficiency to the preference of humans, and it is time that a new concept of a human friendly robot must be proposed that is welcome by human users. The book aims to offer the most up-to-date and valuable information on: •Human Interface & Communication•Human Support Technology•Actuator & Control•Vision & Sensing•Robotics and Design•Manufacturing SystemWe believe this book will bring advanced knowledge and valuable information to the industries as well as to academics and will contribute to the further development in mechatronics and its related fields.

Robotics

Development of an anthropomorphic robotic hand system

Kengo Ohnishi; Yukio Saito Department of Applied Systems Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering Tokyo Denki University Ishizaka, Hatoyama, Hiki, Saitama, 350-0394, JAPAN

This paper describes our development of an anthropomorphic five-digit robotic hand. In addition we describe an cooperative hand -arm control by system. A new model of a mechanical hand is originated from referring to Kapandji’s physiological study of the human hand. A 16-D.O.F. robotic hand including a 1-D.O.F. flexible palm was designed as a test bed for evaluating the functionality of our design. The hand is mounted on a robotic arm, Intelligent Arm, to fully perform the dexterous hand function and to present the hand and arm control obtained from categorization and analysis of the relation in the upper limb movements.

I INTRODUCTION

The research and development of anthropomorphic manipulators is an essential topic in human-friendly machine automation. Research in the area of exercise physiology in the dexterous actions of the digits has had a significant impact on setting a milestone for designing manipulators and upper limb operation devices. Most importantly, creating an appropriate model of the human upper limb is an indispensable issue that affects the design of the human-machine coexisting environment, especially for prosthesis and other assistive devices.

The aim of our research is to propose a new design of an anthropomorphic five-digit robotic hand and a hand-arm cooperation control system based on our hand and arm model. The exercise physiology of a human hand is studied and categorized in order to present a fundamental target for the biomechatronical design of the mechanism and the control system. A human-like five-digit robotic hand with 16 DC micromotors mounted within the hand was designed. We produced the new hand based on our previous research on robotic and prosthetic hands. This new hand is mounted on an 8 D.O.F robotic arm. The control and mechanism of the robotic hand and arm is to be evaluated by experimenting with its performance to demonstrate the effect of our new upper limb model.

1.1 Previous work

Worldly, Human-like robotic hands have been developed based on 20-D.O.F. hand model of Morecki’s, which is a sum of the D.O.F. in the digits. In this model, the use of the palm is disregarded and the prehensile function of the hand is extensively limited. The loss of the arch structures in the palm strongly restricts the opposition of the thumb and the fingers, thus reducing the dexterous adjustability in the prehensile configurations of the five-digit structure.

In our research, we modified the functionality of the five-digit mechanical hand. The Intelligent Hand (see Fig. 1.) is a robotic hand with four fingers and thumb developed in our laboratory.^1],2] This hand has 8 degrees of freedom, seven DC micro motors, and an electromagnetic clutch. Each digit is designed with a 4-bar link mechanism to simultaneously flex and extend the joints in the digit. A universal joint is built in the index finger and the middle finger’s MP joi...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• Preface
• ICMA2000 Conference Committees
• Editorial Note
• ICMA and NTF Lectures
• Human Interface and Communication
• Human Support Technology
• Actuator and Control
• Vision and Sensing
• Robotics
• Design and Manufacturing System
• Author Index