FingerVision Co., Ltd. (Tokyo), a university-launched startup, recently launched a new lineup of robot hands for various industries including automobiles, electrical equipment, materials, semiconductors, logistics, and medical care. In addition to the vision-based tactile robot hand that was sold as standard with one size and shape, and two types of tactile information (force and slip), the company has developed a product lineup with a wide variety of robot hand tips (fingers) and additional visual and tactile information (not only force and slip, but also firmness and positional information).
The company now offers four types of finger size and shape, with more launches to come. Unlike most end-of-arm vendors, FingerVision offers purchase of fingers separately, with surface material of metal or silicone. FingerVision’s vision-based tactile robot hand can now be used not only for the food industry, where on-site implementation of robot systems is already ongoing, but also for a variety of new robot applications.
The FingerVision sensor consists of elastic and transparent skin and an embedded camera. Installing it onto fingertips of a robot hand, the robot can perceive “multimodal” tactile sensation, such as force and slip distributions. This technology enables robots to manipulate objects as a human hand does.
From the sequence of images captured by the camera, the sensor can obtain not only force distribution data (direction of x, y, and z) but also other modalities including slip distribution, object distance, location, pose, \size, shape, texture, weight, foreign substance, etc. The high-resolution camera captures more precise distribution of force and slip than other kinds of tactile sensors. The key driver to enhance the performance is the software, which means the user can flexibly update the performance as needed.
FingerVision is a university-launched start-up, whose core technology is the concept of “estimating tactile sensation based on an image (captured by a camera).”
More information: www.fingervision.jp