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Development of UB Hand 3: Early Results

Conference Paper in Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation · May 2005
DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2005.1570811 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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 Development of UB Hand 3: Early Results
F. Lotti, P. Tiezzi and G. Vassura L. Biagiotti, G. Palli and C. Melchiorri
DIEM, Dep. of Mechanical Engineering DEIS, Dep. of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems
University of Bologna University of Bologna
Via Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy Via Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy
{fabrizio.lotti, paolo.tiezzi, gabriele.vassura}@mail.ing.unibo.it {lbiagiotti, gpalli, cmelchiorri}@deis.unibo.it

Abstract— The first part of this paper describes the devel- investigate advantages and limits of articulated structures
opment of a humanoid robot hand based on an endoskeleton obtained with serial compliant mechanisms: a series of
made of rigid links connected with elastic hinges, actuated by different finger architectures have been built and evaluated
sheath routed tendons and covered by continuous compliant
pulps. The project is called UB Hand 3 (University of Bologna based on this concept and described in previous papers [5],
Hand, 3rd version) and aims to reduce the mechanical [6], [7]. The present paper illustrates the hand architecture
complexity of robotic end effectors yet maintaining full that is the result of the evolution performed so far: it will
anthropomorphic aspect and a good level of dexterity. In the probably be improved in the future, but it seems now a valid
second part this paper focuses on the early experiences of the base to start on-field evaluation of the proposed concepts.
UB Hand 3 in performing manipulation tasks.
Index Terms— Humanoid Robot, Hand Design, Soft Finger,
Some preliminary results of the hand operating capability
Elastic Hinges, Dexterous Manipulation. are presented in the final part of the paper. They have been
obtained with a prototype that only partially implements
I. I NTRODUCTION all the prospected solutions, but already confirm that the
proposed approach exhibits very high potential.
In dexterous robotic hands the reproduction of human
hand compliance during the interaction with the objects to
be manipulated (as demonstrated in [1], [?], [2]) is fun- II. A RCHITECTURE AND KINEMATICS OF THE HAND
damental for grasp adaptability and stability. Furthermore,
a continuous soft cover increases the level of protection The updated prototype of the hand is characterized by
against external agents and unexpected impacts, thus in- a modular structure in which four identical fingers and
creasing the reliability of the robotic hand. Even if these one opposable thumb are assembled on a carpal frame,
advantages are widely recognized, few humanoid robotic that will be connected to a wrist. The overall dimensions
hands, so far, have been designed specifically to optimize of the hand are very similar to the human one and in
this aspect. In most cases they are covered with thin layers Fig. 1 a direct comparison is proposed. A compliant layer,
of elastomeric material, capable to provide high surface reproducing the role of human hand soft tissues, covers the
friction but not enough thick to actually work as real endoskeletal structure, as sketched in Fig. 2. The internal
compliant pads. The usual adoption of mechanical finger articulated structure is designed according the “compliant
structures based prevalently on the exoskeletal pattern, mechanism” concept so that the mobility of the phalanges
which means rigid hollow frames with transmissions or is obtained by means of elastic joints (see Fig. 3a). The
actuation inside [3], [4], makes very difficult to place thick
layers of compliant material around the finger structure
without increasing the size of the fingers beyond acceptable
limits.
The UB Hand 3 project addresses alternative design solu-
tions in order to substitute the exoskeletal structure with an
endo-skeletal articulated frame, aiming to reach the desired
external compliance and to simplify the overall mechanical
complexity of the hand. The general goal of the project
is to test non-conventional design solutions, understanding
what may be their advantages and their limits by means
of theoretical investigation, practical implementation and
testing as well. A strong issue is to test not only the
validity of such solutions in terms of theoretical behavior,
but also to point out and to evaluate technological aspects
related to their application and their compatibility with
general specifications, like the adoption of proper sensory
equipment or the application of specific control strategies.
One of the key choices of the UB Hand 3 project is to Fig. 1. The UB Hand 3 in comparison to the human hand.
 External coating (skin) Soft pad Internal endoskeleton

Fig. 2. Structure of the finger module of the UB Hand 3.

compliant elements are made with close-wound helical

springs that are subjected to bending under the action
of pulling tendons. A limited number of coils is enough
to obtain large displacements while avoiding permanent
deformations and buckling phenomena. As sketched in Fig. Fig. 4. The tendons path inside the finger.
3b multiple springs can be placed in parallel in order to
obtain one d.o.f. hinge. The actuation tendons are routed
across the coiled springs which form at the same time the C

hinges and the routing paths (see Fig. 4). This solution
allows a simplified design with appreciable kinematical
properties like a rough kinematical decoupling of the joints. B

Experimental tests show that the rotational center of

such compliant flexures may be considered fixed in the
whole angular range of the joint (0o - 90o ). Therefore, the A
C2 O
kinematical behavior can be modelled with good approxi-
Center of rotation
mation as an ideal revolute joint with a torsional stiffness. O1

Accordingly it is possible to exploit the usual kinematic

relations between joint configuration and cartesian position,
(a)
and to treat the fingers like standard robots with revolute
pairs. The position of the rotational center of medial and
distal joints are depicted in Fig. 5.
The finger design allows operating with different tendon
Experimental
configurations. In the simplest case (single-acting system), measures

each tendon bends the related joint, while the return is

obtained by means of the flexures elasticity. In this con- Fitting
circumference
figuration the finger stiffness is depending on the hinge B
stiffness and it can’t be fully controlled. The other possible
solution is to implement a double-acting system by adding
A
two antagonistic tendons able to cooperate with the hinge Center of Rotation

in the return phase: one related to the yaw joint and the
other, in the dorsal part of the finger, that works against (b)
the finger bending.
Significant efforts were performed in developing the Fig. 5. Rotational center of medial hinge.
proximal joints of the fingers. Different design solutions
are adopted for the upper fingers and the opposable thumb.
In the upper finger, the yaw joint and the flexural bending
of the proximal phalanges are obtained through two orthog-
onal single axis hinges (see Fig. 6a), while the articulation
at the base of the thumb is obtained by a single two d.o.f.
helicoidal hinge as shown in Fig. 6b. This last joint is
actuated by means of three cooperating tendons that allow
the thumb to bend on a plane having variable direction.
In the UB Hand 3 prototype each finger can have up to 4
degrees of mobility, obtaining a total number of 20 degrees
of mobility. In order to find o good trade-off between the
complexity of the actuation system and the dexterity of the
hand, 16 degrees of mobility are actively actuated whereas
(a) (b) the others are locked or coupled. The thumb and the index
fingers have 4 d.o.f. each one, the middle and the little
Fig. 3. Adoption of coiled spring in elastic hinges. finger have 3 d.o.f. while the ring finger has 2 d.o.f. (see
Tab. I). This configuration, similar to that implemented
in the Robonaut hand project [8], is adopted in order to
have a five fingered hand suitable to perform power and
enveloping grasps, in which only three fingers (the thumb,
the index and the middle) have fully mobility to execute
dexterous manipulation tasks.
The adopted kinematical configuration allows to change
the actual number of d.o.f. without changing the prototype
structure. This strategy, for example, may be applied to
couple the distal and medial bending motion to mimic the
(a)
human finger behavior. Furthermore, by adopting elastic
coupling devices between the linked joints it is possible to
obtain self-adapting grasping procedures.
The fingers, obtained by plastic moulding with inclusion
of continuous steel springs, show a good reliability: after
thousands of working cycles no failures occurred.
TABLE I
D EGREES OF MOBILITY FOR EACH FINGERS

Degree of mobility for each joint

Finger
Yaw Proximal Medial Distal
(b)
Index A A A A
Middle L A A A Fig. 7. Position sensor: FEM model (a) and actual implementation (b).
Ring L A A C
Little A A A C
respect to other solutions:
Thumb A3 A C
• working range for positive and negative angle dis-

A - Actively actuated placements;

L - Locked • fair linearity (see Fig. 8);
C - Coupled with the medial joint • insensitivity with respect to lateral bending and com-
A3 - 2-d.o.f. joint actuated by 3 tendons pression;
The sensing principle, based on strain gauge, allows to
III. S ENSORY APPARATUS simplify the structure of the electronics for the signal
The non-conventional structure of the hand imposes the conditioning and acquisition. In fact, the same principle
design of ad hoc force and position sensors. A systematic will be exploited for tendon tension sensors and a single
analysis of devices able to detect the bending angle of the acquisition chain, with a suitable multiplexing stage for
joints has been performed [7]. Different sensing technolo- all sensors, will be enough. Since the signals produced by
gies have been compared: optical sensors, piezo-resistive a (half-)bridge of strain gauges are very small and easily
sensors, hall-effect sensors and strain-gauge based sensors. influenced by electrical noise (in particular that produced
From the analysis the last solution seems preferable. The by motors), the amplification chain will be located directly
sensor, depicted in Fig. 7, exploits the bending torque on the back of each finger.
exerted by one of the springs composing the hinge on The miniaturized load cell, which monitors the force
a miniaturized load cell, which is integrated into each
phalange. This sensor offers a number of advantages with 3.2

2.8
Output voltage (Volt)

2.6

2.4

2.2

(a) (b) 1.8

−100 −80 −60 −40 −20 0 20 40 60 80 100
Bending angle (degrees)

Fig. 6. Two degrees of freedom articulation of the upper fingers (a) and Fig. 8. Output characteristic of the position sensor.
of the thumb (b).
 Tendon
Deformable structure Motor power electronics

Pulley

Potentiometer
DC motor
Load cell
Sprocket

(a)
Fig. 11. Instrumented actuation module.

Tendon link

The tendon is wrapped around a sprocket, which is fixed to

Strain Gauge
the output shaft of the reduced DC motor, and then it wraps
around a pulley to get the proper direction. This pulley is
fixed on a instrumented support, where two strain gauges
Finger phalange measure the strength applied to the tendon. The modules
are hosted in a purposely designed structure, where each
(b) motor is placed radially respect to the forearm axis with
the tendons directed along the forearm axis. The overall
Fig. 9. Tendon force sensor: FEM model (a) and working principle (b). structure is shown in Fig. 12.
The electronics originally integrated into the motor
(which provides a position control) has been modified in
applied by the tendons to the joints, is properly constrained
order to implement an hardware current/torque control,
in the lower side of each phalange and, at the same time, it
more suitable for robotic applications. In this configuration
sets up the mechanical link between the tendon and the pha-
the actuation system is able to apply to the tendon a
lange. In Fig. 9 the structure and the working mechanism
force of 70N and to close a finger joints in 0.36sec. In
of the sensor are reported. Two strain gauges, disposed in
order to provide the motor electronics with the desired
an half-bridge circuit, are used to measure the deformation
torque set-point and to acquire the (position/force) sensor
of the connector. In Fig. 10 the output characteristic (with
signals, an I/O board has been exploited and a realtime
respect to the force applied to the sensor and the joint
control is performed on a standard personal computer.
configuration) of a prototype is reported. Note that the
The I/O board is a Sensoray 626 Model, a low cost PCI
sensor exhibit an excellent linearity (eL ≈ 1%) and, in
analog and digital I/O Card with four 14-bit D/A outputs,
particular, it is insensitive to the joint angle and, therefore,
to the tendon orientation.
IV. ACTUATION MODULE
The actuation of the hand is provided by a system that
include 16 modular multi-sensorized motors. Each actuator
is based on a very low-cost DC-brushed motor (Hitec HS
475 HB), that is equipped with a position sensor, a tendon
force sensor and custom power electronics (see Fig. 11).

5.5

5
Output Voltage (Volt)

4.5

3.5

2.5

2
10
8 100
6 80
4 60
40
2
20
0 0
Tendon force (Kg)
Joint position (degrees)

Fig. 10. Output characteristic of a tendon tension sensor prototype with

respect to applied force and joint angle. Fig. 12. The Hand and the forearm.
sixteen 16-bit differential A/D input. The PC, used for
realtime control, is a Pentium 4 at 1.8 GHz that is equipped
with RTAI-Linux operating system [9]. This OS provides
realtime functionality both in the kernel and in the user
space and it supports IPC mechanisms like semaphores,
FIFOs and shared memory. These functionalities are used
to build a kernel module for realtime control algorithm
and to implement monitoring tasks and user interfaces in
standard user applications. This system (PC with RTAI- (a) (b)
Linux OS equipped with the I/O board) represents a valid
tool for rapid prototyping of robotic systems and allows to Fig. 14. The UB Hand 3 grasping a bottle (a) and a cylindrical box (b).
reduce the developing time. Since the Sensoray 626 does
not own a sufficient number of input and output channels,
2 interfacing boards for the multiplexing/demultiplexing of • grasping and fingertip manipulation of middle-
the signals have been built (see Fig. 13). sized/small objects (a can, a cylindrical box, etc.).
By means of 4 reading/writing cycles, it is possible to In this phase, all the operations are based on the feed-
provide the 16 value of torque to the motors and to acquire back signals coming from the motors, while the direct
all the sensor signals. This produces a sampling time of the measure of the joint position and tendon force is not
control loop quite large (≈ 4ms), which is acceptable in available yet. Nevertheless, it is worth to notice that, due
this first phase of rapid prototyping. to the inelastic tendons used, the estimation of the hand
The 2 interfacing boards will be redesigned with SMD configuration from the motor position provides excellent
components in order to reduce the overall size of the results. In Fig. 16 the relation between tendon elongation
electronics and to improve the reliability of the cabling and joint angle is shown. Such a relation, experimental
system. obtained by means of a setup including a video-camera
and tendon position/tension sensors, shows two noticeable
V. E XPERIMENTAL ACTIVITIES AND LEARNED LESSONS properties:
While a number of experiments have been carried out on • the motion of the hinge, driven by the tendon, is quite
single parts of the UB Hand 3, i.e. elastic hinges, compliant repeatable (in the graphic 16 the circles corresponding
cover, position and force sensors, the complete structure has to different measures are perfectly overlying);
not been tested yet. Aim of this stage of the project is to • the relation between tendon elongation (h) and joint
demonstrate the capability of the robotic hand to perform angle displacement (θ) can be approximated, with
both grasping operations and manipulation tasks, and to little errors, with the simple expression
highlight the drawbacks of the proposed structure in order p
to further improve the technology of compliant mechanisms h = h0 − r2 + d2 − 2rd cos(θ0 − θ) (1)
and soft pads, by means of structural modifications and/or which depends on geometric parameters of the hinge
suitable control strategies. [7].
Therefore, grasping and manipulation sequences have
been planned:
• enveloping grasp of a glass bottle, Fig. 14.(a);
• fingertip manipulation of a pen, Fig. 15;

(a) (b)

16 Analog In
4 Analog Out
48 Digital I/O

32 Analog In
16 Analog Out
Mux/Demux
Interface
Card
(c) (d)

Fig. 13. The connection between UB Hand 3 and I/O card. Fig. 15. Manipulation sequence of a pen.
 18

16
experimental data
fitting curve elastic-hinged fingers with respect to transverse loads do
14
not seem an unsurmountable obstacle for application to
12
light manipulation tasks, where, on the contrary, a limited
tendon displacement (mm)

10
passive compliance of the finger can play a positive role. A
systematic approach to hinge stiffness evaluation is under
8

development and should provide a valuable tool, not yet

6

available in the literature, for optimizing the hinge design.

4

Severe limitations have been found in the present imple-

2

mentation of the sheath-guided tendinous actuation system,

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
joint angle displacement (degrees)
70 80 90 100
that seems the weakest point of the proposed architecture.
Again, it seems that a wide potential of technological
Fig. 16. Static relation between tendon elongation and joint angle. improvement can exist and the present drawbacks can be
at least reduced, if not eliminated. Changing the pattern
of tendon routing can be another way to further improve
The joint angle carries out from the tendon position the system performance: to this purpose the present finger
measurement by inverting (1). Alternatively, providing a design is ready to host an additional extensor tendon in
desired trajectory of joints, from (1) it is possible to derive order to improve finger dynamics. The rough manipulation
the corresponding trajectory of motors1 . experiments performed so far can not be assumed as
The kinematical considerations presented in sec. II allow representative of the functional capability of the hand;
to implement a control “at the motor level” with an ac- when performed with a previous device with very reduced
ceptable error in the operating space. A simple impedance compliance (the UB Hand 2, 1995) these experiments
control on each motor, with classical elastic and damping proved to be very critical and many times were failing.
terms, was implemented. This kind of controller [10], [11] Now they succeed, even in presence of uncomplete sensory
is suitable for dexterous manipulation, in particular when feedback and simplified control algorithms. It is an early,
hands with such a structure (with a back-drivable actuation partial result that does not allow to say that the followed
chain and with a soft cover) are used. Despite the “almost approach is in absolute the best for designing hands, but it
ideal” static behavior of the hand (concerning the relation simply confirms that it worths going-on.
tendon length /joint angle and the center of rotation) the
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