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.

In this study, an anthropomorphic robot Hand, called “SKKU Hand III” is presented. The hand has thirteen DOF(Degree-Of-Freedom) and is designed based on the skeletal structure of the human hand. Each finger module(except thumb module) has three DOF and four joints with a saddle joint mechanism which has two DOF at the base joint. Two distal joints of the finger module are mechanically coupled by a timing belt and pulleys. The thumb module is composed of a finger module and an additional actuator, which makes it possible to realize the opposition between the thumb and the other fingers. In addition, the palm DOF of the human hand is mimicked with a spatial link mechanism between the index finger and the thumb. Thus, it can grasp objects more stably and more strongly. For the modularization of the robotic hand all the driving circuits are embedded in the hand, and only the communication lines supporting CAN protocol with DC power cable are given as an interface. Therefore, it is possible to apply it to any robot system the interface. To validate the feasibility of the SKKU Hand III, a series of the representative grasp experiments such as power, precision, intermediate grasp etc. are carried out with the object around us and its operation is demonstrated.