Origami Folding by a Robotic Hand

Abstract

Dexterous manipulation by a robotic hand is a difficult problem involving (1) how to design a robot that gives the capability to achieve the task and (2) how to control the designed robot to actually conduct the task. In this paper, we take a task-oriented approach called “task capture” to construct a dexterous robot hand system. Before designing the robot, we analyze how a human being conducts the task, focusing on how the target object is manipulated rather than trying to imitate human finger movement. Based on the captured task, we design a robot that manipulates an object in the same way as a human being may do, with a mechanism as simple as possible, rather than concerning human appearance. As a target task, we choose origami paper folding. We first analyze the difficulty of origami manipulation and design a robotic mechanism that folds an origami form, the Tadpole, based on the proposed approach. The proof of how well the “task capture” approach works is demonstrated by a simple robot we developed, which folds a Tadpole consecutively.