Schunk Gives Robotics Applications a Hand

30 April 2013

As the benchmark in robotic innovations and industry solutions SCHUNK has now optimised its 5-finger hand concept study. The motor controllers on the hand have now been completely integrated into the wrist of the latest anthropomorphic gripper hand to now de-liver an extremely compact solution.

Working with defined interfaces, the Schunk gripper hand can be connected to the Schunk lightweight arm, which is already available and on the market. For mobile applications, the energy supply of the 5-finger hand requires a battery-servable 24V DC. This differs to the first concept version of the hand that was controlled via a serial Bus, providing increased flexibility.

The development of the Schunk gripper hand now sees it become available with a left or right hand version. The size, shape, mobility and overall aesthetics of the hand, draw an amazing resemblance to the human hand. By utilising nine drives, the five fingers can carry out various gripping operations and motions. Moreover, numerous gestures can be constituted, whereby the visual communication between a human and a service robot is simplified. This makes the acceptance for applications in the human environment more practical and likely.

The use of tactile sensors in the fingers will grant the necessary sen-sitivity of the gripper hand for mastering gripping and manipulation tasks. This will be particularly prominent in unstructured and unfore-seeable environments. The new hand also incorporates elastic grip-ping surfaces to ensure a reliable grasp of the gripped objects.