Humans use all surfaces of the hand for contact-rich manipulation. Robot hands, in contrast, typically use only the fingertips, which can limit dexterity. In this work, we leveraged a potential energy–based whole-hand manipulation model, which does not depend on contact wrench modeling like traditional approaches, to design a robotic manipulator. Inspired by robotic caging grasps and the high levels of dexterity observed in human manipulation, a metric was developed and used in conjunction with the manipulation model to design a two-fingered dexterous hand, the Model W. This was accomplished by simulating all planar finger topologies composed of open kinematic chains of up to three serial revolute and prismatic joints, forming symmetric two-fingered hands, and evaluating their performance according to the metric. We present the best design, an unconventional robot hand capable of performing continuous object reorientation, as well as repeatedly alternating between power and pinch grasps—two contact-rich skills that have often eluded robotic hands—and we experimentally characterize the hand’s manipulation capability. This hand realizes manipulation motions reminiscent of thumb–index finger manipulative movement in humans, and its topology provides the foundation for a general-purpose dexterous robot hand.
It is very challenging for a robotic gripper to achieve large reorientations with grasped objects without accidental object ejection. This paper presents a simple gripper that can repeatedly achieve large reorientations over / rad through the kinematics of the hand-object system alone, without the use of high fidelity contact sensors, complex control of active finger surfaces, or highly actuated fingers. This gripper is the result of two kinematic parameter search optimizations connected in cascade. Besides the large range of reorientation attained, the obtained gripper also corresponds to a novel topology since ternary joints in the palm are presented. The inhand planar reorientation capabilities of the proposed gripper are experimentally tested with success.
Wireless transmission of control signals has provided proof of concept and has exposed areas of the software that can be built upon to improve responsiveness. Wireless transmission of the video feed can be adequately performed with basic off-the-shelf components.
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