Proceedings of the 1997 EFlE

Intemational Conference on Robotics and Automation

Albuquerque, New Mexico - April 1997

Development of a Dextrous Gripper for Nuclear Applications

A.Dut t a,G.R.Muzumdar,V.T.Shirwalkar,K.Jayarajan,D .Venkatesh and M. S .Ramakumar

Division of Remote Handling & Robotics
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
Mumbai 400085 India

Abstract robot may have to handle objects which may be hard

The need for dextrous manipulation arises when the or fragile, making sure that it does not damage the
physical dimensions and mechanical properties of the object nor does it allow the object to slip out of the
materials to be handled may not be known precisely. griper. To accomplish this the gripper should be able
For such applications the gripper should be able to con- to control the position of its finger or the force which it
trol the position of its finger or the force which it exerts exerts on the object, and at the same time it should be
on the object, and also be able to detect slip and take able to detect incipient slip and take corrective action.
corrective action. This paper describes certain aspects For this application a Hybrid position/force control
of design involved and experiments carried out using a gripper with slip sensing ability is being developed.
deztrous gripper which is being developed for nuclear This paper essentially describes certain design aspects
applications. involved and experiments carried out using this grip-
per. A few research issues which still remain to be
1 Introduction addressed are also identified.
In the past two decades researchers in the area of
dextrous manipulation have attempted to emulate hu-
man dexterity in Robots and Telemanipulators. How-
ever progress in these attempts have been rather slow,
as pointed out by Howe et al. [l],which is mainly due
to a limited understanding of the physical aspects of
sensory and control interactions during grasping and
manipulation of an object. An examination of how
humans grasp an object will reveal that we first see
the object and estimate how much force may be re-
quired to lift it by using knowledge based on previous
experience. We then apply a grasping force which is
slightly higher than the force required to lift the ob-
ject, continuously monitoring the process to see if the
object is slipping. If slip is detected we increase the
grasping force. The grasping process can be divided Figure I : Photograph of Gripper
into a number of steps such as positioning the fingers
near the object, sensing when contact has been made
and then controlling the forces that occur while ma- 2 Background
nipulating the object. An examination of the human hand would show
In the nuclear industry, Robots and Telemanipula- that the skin on the surface of our hand is compliantly
tors are used for separating humans from hazardous supported by the soft pulp inside. Whitney [a] has
environments. The need for dextrous manipulation pointed out that, active or passive compliance is a way
in the nuclear industry is even more pronounced due of assuring stable force control, although at the cost
to the fact that improved dexterity enhances safety of poor dynamic performance and positional accuracy.
in the material handling and manipulation aspects of Cutkosky et al. [3] and Shimoga et al. [4] have carried
highly radioactive materials with unknown mechanical out various experiments to ascertain the best skin ma-
properties and physical dimensions. In such cases the terial for the contact area of a robots hand. According

0-7803-3612-7-4/97 $5.00 @ 1997 IEEE 1536

to them polyurethane rubber and other types of foam
rubber or sponge are best suited from the view point
of friction, compliance and other desired mechanical
properties. Akella and Cutkosky [5] have carried out
experiments on finger tips which are not only soft but
also actively controllable. Although rubber seems to
be the best choice, its susceptibility to rapid disinte-
gration when exposed to nuclear radiation makes it
unsuitable for use in a radioactive environment. Di-
rect use of rubber is further limited in handling sharp
objects and corrosive materials.
Human fingers are equipped with two types of sen-
sors, one for estimating the total resultant force ex-
erted by the finger and the other, in the form of small
nips on the surface of the skin, for dynamically sensing
incipient slip. Recent studies on slip sensing [7,8] are
of particular relevance to this paper. These works il-
lustrate how contact and incipient slip signals may be
detected and processed for attaining fine manipulation
capabilities. An important point in choosing the force
and slip sensors is that the working of both the sensors
should be mutually exclusive. Various types of tactile
sensors have been reviewed in [6].
Various researchers [1,2,8,11,13] have pointed out
the special control problems associated with dextrous
manipulation. One of the major problems is that the
state of the system keeps changing as contact is made
or broken, or other dynamic effects like rolling or slid-
ing take place. There is still no definite answer as to
what is the best strategy to achieve stable responsive
force control in a dynamic environment. Various ap-
proaches include Stiffness control (see Salisbury [9]),
Impedance control (see Hogan [lo]) and Hybrid posi-
tion/force control (see Raibert and Craig [ll]).In the
past few years most researchers have either stressed on
the pre or post contact phase of the grasping problem.
Akella and Cutkosky [5] and Paul [13] have pointed
out that the middle phase which deals with the prob-
lems encountered when switching over from position
control to force control is still poorly understood.
3 The Gripper
3.1 Mechanical Characteristics
In designing an industrial gripper for nuclear appli-
cations apart from the usual mechanical and control
aspects we also have to consider the effect of radia-
tion and corrosive agents on the gripper material. The
gripper being developed, as shown in Fig.l, can han-
dle a weight of 2.5 kg. It consists of two fingers which
are actuated by a parallel-link mechanism which is
driven by a 12 V permanent magnet DC motor. A
pre-calibrated strain gauge of 350 ohm resistance and
gauge factor 2, is used as the force sensor. The force
r-----l fl Strain
Figure 2: Schematic of the Gripper
sensor is mounted on a cantilever type of link which
is so placed that it measures only the resultant force
exerted by the finger on the object irrespective of the
position of the object between the fingers. Maximum
opening of the gripper is 80". A 10 turn poten-
tiometer is used for obtaining position information. As
mentioned earlier rubber cannot be extensively used
but at the same time some sort of compliance has to
be provided on the finger. To overcome this problem
we have used a thin stainless steel sheet as the main
gripping surface on the finger and it is supported by
two small pieces of rubber to provide compliance. To
increase the coefficient of friction between the object
and the finger, small diamond shaped protrusions have
been machined on the steel sheet. These protrusions
also aid in providing slip information.
The slip sensor used is a piezo electric crystal. This
sensor works essentially like the "pick-up head" of a
gramophone record player. It is fitted in between the
finger and the support steel sheet as shown in Fig. 2.
The slip sensor signal is analyzed to determine when
contact has been made and to subsequently verify if
the object is slipping. The gripper is actuated by a DC
Motor via a wire rope. This was found to be suitable
as the gripper may be mounted on different robots or
telemanipulators in which case the distance between
the gripper and motor may have to be varried. How-
ever the distance between the motor and the gripper
should be as short as possible to reduce the effects of
elasticity and friction. In the test setup the wire rope

1537
length is about 10 cms.
As shown in Fig.2 the relation between the force ex-
erted by the finger and the wire rope tension is given
by :
where:
T = wire rope tension
F = force exerted by the finger on the object
6 = angle between two links.
p = opening of the gripper
For a practical application we first have to decide upon
the size of the object (value of p ) and then the force to
be applied (value of F ) by the finger. Once the value
of p and F are fixed the wire rope tension required is
calculated automatically from equation 1 and 2.
3.2 Control system
3.2.1 Signal processing
The strain gauge bridge is excited by a precise con-
stant voltage reference source. The analogue output
from the strain gauge bridge is amplified by using an
instrumentation amplifier with a low drift and high
CMRR, which is connected to the gripper controller
through a 12 bit analogue to digital converter.
The vibrations caused by slip are reflected as
changes in charge generated in the piezo electric crys-
tal. The current generated due to this charge is first
converted to voltage by an I/V converter and then it
is amplified by an instrument amplifier. This output
is then compared with a preset threshold value and
further processed to produce TTL level pulses before
giving to the microcontroller. If the TTL output is
1 it indicates that slip is occurring, and if it is 0 it
indicates that the object is not slipping. Based on this
result the slip compensation algorithm in the micro-
controller either augments the force being applied by
a preset value or lets it remain at the existing value.
The gripper opening position is sensed by the multi-
turn potentiometer. The position information is suit-
ably amplified and processed to match with full scale
range of a 10 bit Analogue to Digital converter inbuilt
to the gripper controller.
3.2.2 Controller
The Hybrid position/force control system is an archi-
tectural concept to operate within the constrains of
1538
Signal
conditioning - buffer
I d
+ADC HAmplified sensor
CPU I
8096
1
-+conditioning Signal
Figure 3: Block diagram of control system
the task i.e. position control and force control. The
main function of the Hybrid Control system is to de-
cide at which point the controller should switch from
position control to force control. The controller used
for implementing the Hybrid Position/Force control
is a 8096 microcontroller operating at 10 MHz. The
slip compensation algorithm is also implemented by
the same microcontroller. The microcontroller essen-
tially maintains the feedback control loop in position
or force mode of the gripper by appropriately actu-
ating the DC motor through a Digital to Analogue
converter and power amplifier. All the algorithms are
written in assembly language for fast processing.
4 Experiments and Results
4.1 Experimental Procedure
The gripper was fitted on a platform as shown in
Fig. 1 and a few tasks were performed. The chosen
task was a simple gripping operation of applying a
predetermined force on an object and verifying if it is
slipping.The task was divided into the following steps:
0 Close the fingers using position control.
e Switch over to force control and apply a predet-
ermined force once contact is made.
0 Monitor the slip sensor to determine if slip is
occurring, and if so, increase the gripping force
by a preset value.
The results obtained are discussed in the next section.
4.2 Results
The first plot (A) in Fig.4 shows the position of the
finger with respect to time. Shortly after the gripper
 is actuated the gripper finger reaches its desired posi-
tion, grips the object and remains steady thereafter.
( A ) It may be noted that the interactions that occur when
the finger first makes contact with the object, such as
Finger position vs Time small vibrations, are not reflected in this plot. This
may be because of the compliance in the system due
to which the vibrations are damped out before they
reach the potentiometer.
The second plot (B) in Fig.4 reflects force exerted
by the finger on the object with respect to time. In
this case no slip occurs so the gripping force remains
3 6 9 12 steady.
time(s e c ) The third plot (C) shows how the slip signal is re-
flected with respect to time as the object slips through
0) the fingers. As soon as the slip signal exceeds the
Force vs Time ( w i t h o u t slip) threshold value, point " A , the force being exerted
by the finger is augmented by a preset value. The
n ;
threshold value has to be very carefully set after ex-
z 2) perimenting with various types of objects.
The fourth plot (D) in Fig 4. indicates how the
0
L I gripping force is augmented if slip is detected. At
4
0
I point "A" the controller understands that the object
3 6 9 12 is slipping and it automatically augments the force
time(s e c ) being applied. It is important to note that the force
being applied should be lncremented by a value such
that it is just able to hold the object without damaging
it.
Slip signal vs T i m e
5 Conclusion and Scope
-
F
v
TTL o u t p u t In this paper we have discussed about the design,
development and experimentation of a dextrous grip-
per. The results obtained verify that prevention of slip
is possible by controlling the force being applied by the
gripper. However, the force response of the gripper is
affected by the elasticity and friction of the wire rope
I im.. I drive. To increase the response of the gripper, it may
be directly actuated by a DC motor,
3 6 9 12 There is still further scope for improvement of the
time( s e c ) dextrous gripper. The following issues still remain to
be addressed :
(Dl e Controlling the rate at which the force is increased

Force vs Time ( w i t h slip) or decreased as the gripper holds or releases an object.

41 e Considering the exact dynamic effects which occur

z l
v
as the finger makes contact with the object.

i2L
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