Tactile sensor-less fingertip contact detection and force estimation for stable grasping with an under-actuated hand

Abstract Detecting contact when fingers are approaching an object and estimating the magnitude of the force the fingers are exerting on the object after contact are important tasks for a multi-fingered robotic hand to stably grasp objects. However, for a linkage-based under-actuated robotic hand with a self-locking mechanism to realize stable grasping without using external sensors, such tasks are difficult to perform when only analyzing the robot model or only applying data-driven methods. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid of previous approaches is used to find a solution for realizing stable grasping with an under-actuated hand. First, data from the internal sensors of a robotic hand are collected during its operation. Subsequently, using the robot model to analyze the collected data, the differences between the model and real data are explained. From the analysis, novel data-driven-based algorithms, which can overcome noted challenges to detect contact between a fingertip and the object and estimate the fingertip forces in real-time, are introduced. The proposed methods are finally used in a stable grasp controller to control a triple-fingered under-actuated robotic hand to perform stable grasping. The results of the experiments are analyzed to show that the proposed algorithms work well for this task and can be further developed to be used for other future dexterous manipulation tasks.