Six-Axis Force/Torque Fingertip Sensor for an Anthropomorphic Robot Hand

To manipulate objects using a robot hand, it is important to measure the information of the various forces on the fingertips. In this letter, a six-axis force/torque (F/T) fingertip sensor for a robot hand is introduced. The sensor was developed to provide the ability to measure six-axis F/T while remaining feasible for robot fingertip integration because of its miniaturization, light weight, and low cost (thanks to its simple manufacturing process). In particular, a novel highly sensitive shear force measurement method is proposed that uses the eccentricity of two cylinders. The designed six-axis F/T sensor was also fabricated. We demonstrate that the developed sensor can be easily installed into the human-sized fingertip of a robot, and we performed an accuracy evaluation using several experiments.