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In this paper, the authors propose a hybrid tactile sensor system consisting of a Carbon Micro Coil (CMC) touch sensor and a force sensor. This sensor system has the capability of measuring fine deformation of several micrometers occurring to a CMC sensor element, as well as the compression force. The sensor element is made of silicon rubber containing CMCs, and it is considered that the sensor element constitutes an LCR circuit. When the sensor element is deformed mechanically, the CMC sensor produces signals due to the modification of the circuit. In the experiment, the CMC sensor's outputs are sampled in response to the fine deformations of 1 to 9 µm. And it is found that the CMC sensor's outputs depend on the magnitude of the compression force since the sensor output for a fine deformation increases gradually as the compression force increases. Therefore, to measure the amount of the fine deformation regardless of the compression force, the measurement method for extracting the CMC sensor's output for the fine deformation from the overall sensor output for the deformation that includes the compressive deformation and the fine deformation is developed. In addition, the performance of the sensor system in measuring fine deformations is evaluated in the experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes flexible and efficient control system of a robot hand for intelligent human-interactive tasks. The intelligent tasks require various sensors and lots of software. We designed the hardware and software of the control system. The hardware includes a PC and multiple micro control units (MCUs) so that various sensors such as range sensors, acceleration sensors and photo sensors can be added flexibly and efficiently. The calculation in the system can be distributed to the PC and the multiple MCUs. The software system is designed so that various software elements can be easily integrated. RT-middleware is utilized for the integration. Two applications of the system are presented to show the flexibility of the system. The hand is integrated with range sensor in one application and microphone in the other. The results of the experiments show the effectiveness of the control system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]