Design of a Five-Fingered Hand with Full-Fingered Tactile Sensors Using Conductive Filaments and Its Application to Bending after Insertion Motion

TL;DR

This work addresses enabling tool use through bending after insertion by a slender five-fingered hand, leveraging a full-finger tactile sensing approach. It introduces a nerve inclusion flexible epidermis that combines a flexible epidermis with conductive nerve lines whose resistance changes reveal contact points across the finger, enabling precise touch localization. The design integrates Voronoi-structured epidermis, carefully engineered nerve lines, and a wire-driven hand with an internal rotation mechanism to realize post-insertion bending, supported by calibration and tool-use experiments (e.g., scissors) that demonstrate closed-loop sensing and manipulation. The approach advances safe and adaptable tool manipulation for home-robot assistance by providing rich, full-finger tactile feedback and scalable integration with other robotic systems.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to construct a contact point estimation system for the both side of a finger, and to realize a motion of bending the finger after inserting the finger into a tool (hereinafter referred to as the bending after insertion motion). In order to know the contact points of the full finger including the joints, we propose to fabricate a nerve inclusion flexible epidermis by combining a flexible epidermis and a nerve line made of conductive filaments, and estimate the contact position from the change of resistance of the nerve line. A nerve inclusion flexible epidermis attached to a thin fingered robotic hand was combined with a twin-armed robot and tool use experiments were conducted. The contact information can be used for tool use, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: system config of the proposed method
• Figure 2: Differences in mesh density settings by part. Low density is used for joints that move a lot, and high density is used for parts that require strength.
• Figure 3: Overview of a nerve line. The two parts are insulated and their opposite sides are the junction with conductor wires
• Figure 4: A cross section of the finger. The nerve line is arranged across the epidermis.
• Figure 5: View of the nerve line when the finger is bent. Contact is not detected because the string-like part folds outward.