Development of robotic fingertip morphology for enhanced manipulation stability

Abstract

This study aims to develop a fingertip in order to improve the manipulation performance of posture interpolation control for a multifingered robot hand. Increasing the contact area between the fingertips and object is one solution for improving grasping and manipulation stability. A reasonable fingertip shape design and material selection can increase the contact area. In this paper, we compare an anthropomorphic shape to a cylindrical body with a semispherical tip. In order to test the practical property such as contact area size of our proposed fingertip, a pressure experiment was conducted for comparing the two fingertip shapes under different workloads. Finally, we installed the fingertips on a commercial available robot hand Allegro Hand. Two tasks were conducted for evaluating our proposed fingertip with posture interpolation control. The results show that our proposed fingertip could improve manipulation performance by comparing the success rate in both the experiments.