Object Reorientation with Finger Gaiting

Abstract

Coordinated object manipulation is a fundamental problem in the study of multi-fingered robotic hands. The conventional study has been focused on deriving control algorithms for finger joints to implement a specified object trajectory and recently more effort has been put into the study of automatic object trajectory planning. This paper discusses how to plan large-scale object reorientation with fingers of limited workspace. The relevant theories of contact kinematics, nonholonomic motion planning, grasp stability and finger gaiting are incorporated to develop a general framework of object reorientation with rolling contacts and finger gaiting. Our approach is illustrated by an example of reorienting a sphere with three hemi-spherical fingertips. The simulation results are presented. ( Full Paper (pdf))