Development of five-fingered haptic interface: HIRO-II

This paper presents the design and the characteristics of a new developed five-fingered haptic interface robot named HIRO II. The haptic interface can present force and tactile feeling at the five fingertips of the human hand. It is designed to be completely safe and similar to the human upper limb both in shape and motion ability. Its mechanism consists of a 6 DOF arm and a 15 DOF hand. The interface is placed opposite to the human hand, which brings safety and no oppressive feeling, but this leads to difficulty in controlling the haptic interface because it should follow the hand poses of the operator. A redundant force control method in which all the joints of the mechanism were force controlled simultaneously to present the virtual force is studied. Experimental results to show high potential of a multi-fingered haptic interface are presented.