A Humanoid Robot Upper Limb System with Anthropomorphic Robot Hand: GCUA Hand II

Gesture-changeable under-actuated (GCUA) function is presented to make robot hand grasp objects dexterously and achieve humanoid manipulations with low dependence on control system. Based on GUCA function, GCUA Hand II is developed, which has 5 fingers and 14 DOFs. All the fingers use similar tendon mechanisms to achieve GCUA function which includes traditional under-actuated (UA) grasping motion and special pre-bending (PB) motion. With GCUA Hand II, a humanoid robot upper limb system is developed, which has two 3-DOF arms actuated by stepper motors and two 14-DOF hands actuated by DC motors. The control system includes four parts: computer, motion controller based on FPGA, driver module, and user module, which can control the upper limb system to do various movements dexterously and exactly. The control system and spatial motion program are designed. This system has a great prospect in the field of robotics and rehabilitation engineering.