Innovative Human-Like Dual Robotic Hand Mechatronic Design and its Chess-Playing Experiment

This paper describes how a standard HI-tech WINner Corporation articulated six degrees of freedom (DOFs) industrial robot arm and a National Taiwan University five-finger robotic hand was equipped with additional hardware and software to enable the resulting machine to play chess with a human chess player. For automatic interaction with the human player, moves were recorded by a webcam and automatically analyzed. No manual (keyboard) input was necessary. The chess-playing robotic system has been provided. An innovative humanoid robotic hand with 12 DOFs and 19 joints were designed, and distributed tactile sensor arrays with 376 detecting points on its surface were developed. The hand can communicate with the external through controller area networks bus. For performance evaluation of the designed robotic hand, we analyzed the workspace, intersection volume, and manipulability. First, several anatomical analyses were conducted prior to a decision on the kinematic design. Optimization procedures were then developed in this study to improve the parameters of the design and structure of the mechanism. The concepts of a series elastic actuator and an under-actuated mechanism were also employed to give the robotic hand a compliant property and high dexterity; hence, a humanoid robotic hand was devised. Since the robotic hand is as small and dexterous as a human hand, it can be conveniently used for a wide range of applications. Finally, the system has been proved to be executable in a complex environment.