Robot Hand with a Sensor for Cloth Handling

A robot or robot system is regarded as a general-purpose machine system that, like a human, can perform many tasks under conditions un-known a priori. In this paper, it was shown that a robot hand to handle pieces of cloth was manufactured for trial and plural functions of the hand was studied experimentally. The results obtained were as follows. (1) The robot hand was able to separate a piece of cloth (about 0.5mm in thickness) from a stack of pieces of cloth. (2) The output signal from the strain gauge of the hand considered to be nearly in proportion to the thickness of pieces of cloth (0.1mm N 3.0mm in thickness, under a pressure of 2.5N/cm2) held by the hand and by the signal, it was possible to distinguish thickness of the pieces of cloth. (3) The tension of a piece of cloth could be controlled between 0.09 N 0.12N by the arm and the hand.