• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.142-147
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• 1998

Developing robot hands with multi-degree-of-freedom is one of the topics that researchers have recently begun to improve the limitation by adding flexibility and dexterity. In this study, an articulated servo-pneumatic robot hand system with direct-drive joints has been developed whose main feature is the minimization of the dimension. The servo-pneumatic system is advantageous to fabricate a dexterous robot hand system due to the high torque-to-weight and torque-to-volume ratio. This enables the design of a finger joint with an integrated rotary vane type actuator which produces high output torque without reduction gears, being very robust. In order to control the servo-pneumatic finger joints, a miniature proportional valve that can be attached to the robot hand is required. In this paper, a flapper nozzle type 4/3-way proportional directional valve has been designed and tested. The experimental results show that the developed valve can control a finger joint satisfactorily without much vibratory joint movements and acoustic noises.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.404-414
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• 2000

This paper addresses the development of a 3-fingered humanoid robot hand system and a real-time grasp synthesis of multifingered robot hands to find grasp configurations which satisfy the force closure condition of arbitrary shaped objects. We propose a fast and efficient grasp synthesis algorithm for planar polygonal objects, which yields the contact locations on a given polygonal object to obtain a force closure grasp by the multifingered robot hand. For an optimum grasp and real-time computation, we develop the preference and the hibernation process and assign physical constraints of the humanoid hand to the motion of each finger. The preferences consist of each sublayer reflecting the primitive preference similar to the conditional behaviors of humans for given objectives and their arrangements are adjusted by the heuristics inspired from human's grasping behaviors. The proposed method reduces the computational time significantly at the sacrifice of global optimality, and enables the grasp posture to be changable within two-finger and three-finger grasps. The performance of the presented algorithm is evaluated via simulation studies to obtain the force-closure grasps of polygonal objects with fingertip grasps. The architecture suggested is verified through experimental implementation to our robot hand system by solving the 2- or 3-finger grasp synthesis.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.220-229
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• 2011

This paper focuses on a development of an anthropomorphic robot hand. Human hand is able to dexterously grasp and manipulate various objects with not accurate and sufficient, but inaccurate and scarce information of target objects. In order to realize the ability of human hand, we develop a robot hand and introduce a control scheme for stable grasping by using only kinematic information. The developed anthropomorphic robot hand, KITECH Hand, has one thumb and three fingers. Each of them has 4 DOF and a soft hemispherical finger tip for flexible opposition and rolling on object surfaces. In addition to a thumb and finger, it has a palm module composed the non-slip pad to prevent slip phenomena between the object and palm. The introduced control scheme is a quitely simple based on the principle of virtual work, which consists of transposed Jacobian, joint angular position, and velocity obtained by joint angle measurements. During interaction between the robot hand and an object, the developed robot hand shows compliant grasping motions by the back-drivable characteristics of equipped actuator modules. To validate the feasibility of the developed robot hand and introduced control scheme, collective experiments are carried out with the developed robot hand, KITECH Hand.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.107-114
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• 2020

In robotic harvesting, a gripper to manipulate the fruits needs to be attached to the robot system. We proposed a flexible robot gripper that can actively respond to the shape of an object such as fruits in the previous work. However, we found that there is a possibility of not being reliably gripped when the object slides during contact with a finger. In this paper, the improved gripper design is proposed to fundamentally solve the problems of the previous gripper. The position of the finger and the maximum closed position are changed, and the design improvement is performed to increase the grip stability by changing the installation angle of the link portion of the finger. Based on the improved design, a modified gripper is fabricated by 3-D printing, and then gripping experiments are performed on spherical object and fruit model object. It is shown that the gripper can stably grip the objects without excessive bending of the finger link of the gripper. The contact pressure between the finger and the surface of the object is measured, and it is verified that it is a sufficiently small pressure that does not cause damage to the fruit. Therefore, the proposed gripper is expected to be successfully applied in harvesting.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.219-224
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• 2002

This paper aims to derive a mathematical model of the dynamics of handling tasks in robot finger which stable grasping and manipulates a rigid object with some dexterity. Firstly, a set of differential equation describing dynamics of the manipulators and object together with geometric constraint of tight area-contacts is formulated by Lagrange's equation. Secondly, problems of controlling both the internal force and the rotation angle of the grasped object under the constraints of area-contacts of tight area-contacts are discussed. The effect of geometric constraints of area-contacts on motion of the overall system is analyzed and a method of computer simulation for overall system of differential-algebraic equations is presented. Thirdly, simulation results are shown and the effects of geometric constraints of area-contact is discussed. Finally, it is shown that even in the simplest case of dual single D.O.F manipulators there exists a sensory feedback from sensing data of the rotational angle of the object to command inputs to joint actuators and this feedback connection from sensing to action eventually realizes secure grasping of the object, provided that the object is of rectangular shape and motion is confined to a horizontal plane.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.62-69
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• 2008

A specialized anthropomorphic robot hand which can be attached to the biped humanoid robot MAHRU-R in KIST, has been developed. This built-in type hand consists of three fingers and a thumb with total four DOF(Degrees of Freedom) where the finger mechanism is well designed for grasping typical objects stably in human's daily activities such as sphere and cylinder shaped objects. The restriction of possible motions and the limitation of grasping objects arising from the reduction of DOF can be overcome by reflecting a typical human finger's motion profile to the design procedure. As a result, the developed hand can imitate not only human hand's shape but also its motion in a compact and efficient manner. Also this novel robot hand can perform various human hand gestures naturally and grasp normal objects with both power and precision grasping capability.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.127-133
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• 2014

This paper describes a design and manufacture of a two-axis force sensor and a single-axis force sensor for the fingers of an intelligent robot's hand. The robot's finger is composed of a two-axis force sensor, a first knuckle, a single-axis force sensor, a second knuckle, a spring, a motor of first knuckle, a motor of second knuckle, and so on. The two-axis force sensor attached to the first knuckle and the single-axis force sensor attached to the second knuckle were designed and manufactured, and the characteristics test of two sensors was carried out. As a test results, the interference error of the two-axis force sensor was less than 0.68%, the repeatability error of each sensor was less than 0.02%, and then the non-linearity was less than 0.03%. It is thought that the sensors can be used for the fingers of the intelligent robot's hand for rehabilitation exercise of finger patients.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.201-208
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was conducted to develop a vegetable transplanting robot which transplants seedlings from a nursery tray to a plant pot using its four fingers. Method: The robot consists of the transplanting part, nursery tray moving part, plant pot moving part, main frame and controller. Two moving parts are controlled by the photo sensor and servo motor. The transplanting part was composed with two components; transporting device using E-MY2H(SMC Corp., Japan) for controlling finger position accurately and finger for transplanting the seedling. Results: Head lettuce using the transplanting robot was transplanted in 21 days after sowing based upon the seed shape measurement and removing examination. The optimal finger shape was thin pin type because it caused minimum damage to the roots of seedlings. Conclusions: The four inclined pin type was applied to remove the seedlings from the nursery tray. In addition, the transplanting capacity of the developed robot was 2800 pots per hour and the rate of success was 99% and above.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.322-333
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• 2022

The Avatar robot, which is one of the teleoperation robots, aims to enable users to feel the robot as a part of the body to intuitively and naturally perform various tasks. Considering the purpose of the avatar robot, an end-effector identical to a human hand is advantageous, but a robotic hand with human hand level performance has not yet been developed. In this paper we propose a new 3-finger robotic hand with human-avatar hand posture mapping algorithm which were integrated with TOCABI-AVATAR, one of the teleoperation system. Due to the flexible rolling contact joints and tendon driven mechanism applied to the finger, the finger could implement adaptive grasping and absorb the impact force caused by unexpected contacts. In addition, human-avatar hand mapping algorithm using five calibration hand postures propose to compensate physical differences between operators. Using the TOCABI-AVATAR system with the robotic hands and mapping algorithm, the operator can perform 13 out of 16 hand postures of grasping taxonomy and 4 gestures. In addition, using the system, we participated in the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE Semi-final and successfully performed three scenarios which including various social interactions as well as object manipulation.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.15-21
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• 1992

This paper presents the ROBOT MODAPTS(Modular Arrangement of Predetermi- ned Time Standards) technique which can be applied to the robot motion analysis. Robot motions are easily divided into several movement activities and terminal activi- ties by means of the ROBOT MODAPTS technique Each link of robot arm is numbered such that finger is 1, hand is 2, elbow is 3, and so on. The robot motion time of each link is counted by multipling its given number to some time values observed at the finger movement. We can easily estimate robot teaching task time with this technique. This technique can be applied efficiently to establishing an adaptable robot motion ergonomically.