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GCUA Humanoid Robotic Hand with Tendon Mechanisms and Its Upper Limb

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Abstract

Upper limbs of human beings are extremely special and significant, which obtain crucial function to achieve manipulations intelligently and dexterously. Gesture-Changeable Under-Actuated (GCUA) grasping function is presented to improve the capability of robotic hands to achieve humanoid manipulations with low dependence on control and sensor feedback systems, which includes traditional under-actuated (UA) grasping motion and special pre-bending (PB) motion. Based on GCUA function, GCUA Hand II is developed, which has 5 fingers and 14 DOF. All the fingers use similar tendon mechanisms and motors to achieve GCUA function. With GCUA Hand II, a humanoid robot upper limb system is designed, which has two 3-DOF arms actuated by stepper motors and two 14-DOF hands actuated by DC motors. The control system includes four parts: a computer, a FPGA motion controller, a driver module, and a user module, which can control the upper limb system to do various movements dexterously and exactly. With C++ language, a spatial motion program is designed to assist researchers to determine spatial motions of the upper limb system. This system has a great prospect in the field of rehabilitation engineering, extremely environmental manipulation, humanoid robotics and social services.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 10008, China

    Demeng Che & Wenzeng Zhang

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  1. Demeng Che
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  2. Wenzeng Zhang
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Correspondence to Wenzeng Zhang.

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Che, D., Zhang, W. GCUA Humanoid Robotic Hand with Tendon Mechanisms and Its Upper Limb. Int J of Soc Robotics 3, 395–404 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-011-0106-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-011-0106-y

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