Abstract
The manipulation abilities of a multi-fingered dexterous hand, such as motion in real-time, flexibility, grasp stability etc., are largely dependent on its control system. This paper developed a control system for the YWZ dexterous hand, which had five fingers and twenty degrees of freedom (DOFs). All of the finger joints of the YWZ dexterous handwere active joints driven by twenty micro-stepper motors respectively. The main contribution of this paper was that we were able to use stepper motor control to actuate the hand's fingers, thus, increasing the hands feasibility. Based the actuators of the YWZ dexterous hand, we firstly developed an integrated circuit board (ICB), which was the communication hardware between the personal computer (PC) and the YWZ dexterous hand. The ICB included a centre controller, twenty driver chips, a USB port and other electrical parts. Then, a communication procedure between the PC and the ICB was developed to send the control commands to actuate the YWZ dexterous hand. Experiment results showed that under this control system, the motion of the YWZ dexterous hand was real-time; both the motion accuracy and the motion stability of the YWZ dexterous hand were reliable. Compared with other types of actuators related to dexterous hands, such as pneumatic servo cylinder, DC servo motor, shape memory alloy etc., experiment results verified that the stepper motors as actuators for the dexterous handswere effective, economical, controllable and stable.
Highlights
The successful development of industrial robots has largely beenrelatedto the robotic end‐effecters that can perform specific manufacturing and handling tasks
In addition to its thumb, the other four fingers are of the same modular mechanical structures.All of the finger joints of the YWZ dexterous handare active joints driven by twenty micro‐stepper motors respectively
In order to prevent the current which flows through the motor windings from becoming too large, the driver chip has an internal pulse width modulation (PWM) current control circuitry to satisfy the different currents of the different stepper motors
Summary
The successful development of industrial robots has largely beenrelatedto the robotic end‐effecters that can perform specific manufacturing and handling tasks. The Stanford / JPL hand developed by Mason et al used 12 DC servo motors as the actuators to drive the finger joints using the servo closed loop control [2]. The DLR‐Ihand developed by Butterfass et al used linear motors as the actuators to drive the finger joints, the analogue signals for themotion control reduced the motion reliability of the dexterous hand [4,5]. In this paper we use micro‐stepper motors [10] as the internal actuators of the YWZ multi‐fingered dexterous hand to analyse and test its motion characteristics, which are expected to achieve grasping accuracy, reliability, stability and real‐time movement
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