Robot Hand

Origami Folding Robot

Dexterous robotic hands have been anticipated in various applications．Although many robot hands have been developed, their dexterity is still far below that of the human hand. As a steppingstone to a dexterous robotic hand, we developed a robotic hand which can do origami folding.

The existing origami robots (e.g., the one by Balcom and Mason ) can perform only simple folding. We aimed to develop a robot that can perform more complicated foldings．Before designing a robot，we first analyzed origami manipulation and defined the difficulty of origami manipulations and foldings. We then designed a robotic mechanism that can make a origami form (Tadpole) based on the observation of origami folding by a human.

Although the appearance of the developed robotic hand is dissimilar to that of human hand, we succeeded in making a origami work by the developed robotic hand.


Overview of the prototyped origami folding robot


Origami form, Tadpole, folded by our robot

*Tadpole was originally invented by H.Shingu. See "EASY ORIGAMI"collections in his web site. (http://www.origami-club.com/en/ )

Demo movie (MPEG4) 4.77MB
*You need QuickTime Player to watch this movie.

Related papers

  1. Kenta Tanaka, Yusuke Kamotani, and Yasuyoshi Yokokohji, "Origami Folding by a Robotic Hand," Proc. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2007), October 29-November 2, San Diego, CA, USA, pp.2540--2547, 2007.
  2. Kenta Tanaka, Yusuke Kamotani, and Yasuyoshi Yokokohji, "Origami Folding by a Robotic Hand," Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, Vol.20, No.4, pp.550-558, 2008.

Other Projects

Other robotic hand projects will be shown when they are ready to open to public.

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