A SURVEY OF MULTIFINGERED ROBOT HANDS - ISSUES AND GRASPING ACHIEVEMENTS

Recently a substantial amount of research has been done in the field o f dextrous manipulation and hand manoeuvres. The main concern has been how to control robot hands so that they can execute manipulation task s with the same dexterity and intuition as human hands. This paper sur veys multi-fingered robot hand research and development topics which i nclude robot hand design, object force distribution and control, grip transform, grasp stability and its synthesis, grasp stiffness and comp liance motion and robot arm-hand coordination. Three main topics are p resented in this article. The first is an introduction to the subject. The second concentrates on examples of mechanical manipulators used i n research and the methods employed to control them. The third present s work which has been done on the field of object manipulation.