Robot hand – fast as a bullet

The robot hand developed at Japan’s Ishikawa Komuro Lab, is so fast and skillful that it can complete many different tasks without errors and at very high speeds. The hand was first developed in 2007.

The principle the robotic hand was built on is called “Skillful manipulation based on high speed sensory motor fusion”.

The robot has three fingers, small harmonic drive gear, and a high power actuator used for each finger movement, and its hand can close 180 degrees in 1/10th of a second. Its vision chip enables visual processing of movements within 1 milisecond. The tactile sensors at the fingertips can measure pressure as distributed load and total load within one milisecond.

The robot can:

Dribble a ball with a period of 100 ms, and maintains this motion even at this very high speed, and in addition, it can shift this periodical motion to other states of dribbling.

Spin a pen at very high speeds, which is done by shifting contact force and timing of shifts using high speed real time tactile feedback.

Throw a ball successfully into a basket, by using new control methods for high speed manipulation.

Knot rope with only one hand (and don’t forget that it has only three fingers), where the task is programmed into three subskills such as loop production, rope permutation and rope pulling.

Grasp a very small object with tweezers.

Grasp a moving object, which is called dynamic regrasping, in which, the position and orientation of the target are computed by a high speed vision system, and then the robot adjusts its position in order to catch the object.

High speed sensory motor fusion is bound to find many applications in the near future, once it can be applied to other robots, such as androids, and commercialized. Combined with other robotic skills, these skills are such that we can not even dream of today.

See video below:

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