Compliant Fingers Make Simple Sensors Smart

Compliance in robot hands has been shown to enhance grasping performance and robustness. This paper presents analysis and experiments to show that compliance also enables measurement of important object parameters using simple joint angle sensors. Compliance reduces control requirements so that it is easy to trace object surfaces, while joint angle measurements can reveal contact locations and contact force vectors. While these techniques are limited in the complexity of the contact situations where they can be applied, they are highly effective in many situations, and can be implemented at very low cost due to their use of existing joint angle sensors.