Two-Finger Gripper with Variable Stiffness of Finger Pad for Hardware Filtering in Dynamic Touch.

By using a mechanism that dynamically changes morphology, it would be possible to always perform the optimal morphological processing, e.g. hardware filtering in a task. In this study, we proposed a soft mechanism in which the morphology of the finger pad changes, in this case with variable stiffness, and investigated the relationship between the stiffness of the finger pad and classification accuracy in an object classification task using dynamic touch. The proposed mechanism was implemented on the finger pad of a two-finger gripper and shaken while grasping a PET bottle filled with different contents. As a result, we confirmed that the time series information obtained from the torque sensor at the wrist changed depending on the stiffness of the finger pad, and that the content classification results using the time series information changed.