High-Speed Ring Insertion by Dynamic Observable Contact Hand

This study proposes a dynamic observable contact (DOC) hand as a new multifingered hand to ensure high- speed insertion in an assembly process with a small clearance between objects. To achieve insertion with a small clearance at high speed, a robot hand must realize both impact reduction and position-error compensation when the two objects contact each other. The DOC hand, with its features of 6-degrees-of- freedom dynamic passivity and object-pose observability, can realize both impact reduction and position-error compensation. To evaluate the effectiveness of the DOC hand, we construct a robot system using the DOC hand. We evaluate the performance of the system in the task of ring insertion with a small clearance (0-36um). The results indicate that the robot system performs with a higher speed than a human. In fact, the average cycle time is 2.42 s for the robot, whereas it is 2.58 s for a human. The DOC hand has opened up the possibility for achieving high-speed precision assembly using robots.