Noncontact Hold and Transfer Control by a Two-link Robot Arm with a Magnetic Robot Hand

We developed a two-link robot arm with a magnetic hand constructed from an electromagnet and a gap sensor. The sensor consists of an excitation current sensor and a Hall element. We then designed noncontact hold and transfer control consisting of a magnetic H ∞ robust levitation controller of the steel sphere using the robot hand and a high-precision tracking controller using a disturbance cancellation controller based on a disturbance observer. The magnetic H ∞ robust levitation controller is designed using normalized caprice factorization. We conducted an experiments on non contact hold and transfer control of the steel sphere and demonstrated the high performance of control using the 2-link robot arm and the magnetic robot hand.