DLR-HIT-Hand

Based on the DLR-Hand II, DLR (German Aerospace Center) and HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) have jointly developed a multisensory robot hand. The hand has four fingers with four joints and three actuators each. The thumb has an extra degree of freedom for fine manipulation and power grasping. The actuators are commercial brushless DC motors with analog Hall sensors. All the motors are integrated in the fingers and in the palm, respectively.

Each joint is equipped with a contactless magnetic joint angle sensor and a strain-gauge based joint torque sensor. A high speed real-time serial communication bus (25 Mbps) has been implemented using FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array). Altogether only four wires are needed for the serial communication between the Hand and external CPU. The hand is controlled by one Digital Signal Processor embedded in a PCI card for any commercial PC. From the PC the hand can be controlled easily by a user-friendly interface and at the same time all the sensor data are displayed on the screen.

The DLR-Hand is recognized as technologically leading worldwide. By using commercially available brushless DC motors the HIT-DLRHand was designed to become a close-to-production version of the DLR-Hand II. It provides a promising base for a future series of complex multisensory robot hands.

Technical Specifications:

  • The hand has four fingers and each finger has four joints and three degrees of freedom
  • The thumb has an extra degree of freedom for power grasping and fine manipulation
  • About 1.8 Kg in weight
  • Total 65 analog sensors and 4 fingertip force sensors (optional)
  • Maximum joint speed over 180 degrees/second
  • Nominal fingertip force 5 N, peak fingertip force 7 N.
  • Simple but powerful serial communication system, running at 25Mbps, and length up to 5 meters
  • There are only 4 wires needed to interface with host processor
  • Only one 24V power source is required
  • Power consumption only 0.75A at standby, and 2.7A for grasping object
  • Powerful embedded DSP host processor running at 225 MHz, performance of up to 1350 MFLOPS
  • Up to 5KHz signal sampling rate
  • Host DSP processor was designed as PCI board, provides high performance and Plug & Play
  • Powerful PC software platform for easy debugging and managing user specific DSP algorithms