The ability to conduct within-hand manipulation provides significant dexterity and flexibility advantages, which would greatly benefit robots operating in unstructured and dynamic environments. Yet, robotic within-hand manipulation is challenging to implement, even for highly-articulated, instrumented and expensive robotic hands, mainly due to the lack of accurate hand-object and contact models.
In our work, we leverage a robotic hand with fingers that can change their effective surface friction on demand. This is achieved by a simple actuated mechanism of interlaced surfaces.
This achieves controlled sliding and rotation of a grasped object with simple actions, beyond the capabilities of many robotic hands. We work on robust and autonomous vision-based manipulation strategies exploiting the advantages of such switching mechanisms.
We provided a vision-based control scheme and a A* planner for this hand for autonomous planar within-hand manipulation.
We then extended the capabilities of the hand to 3D via extrinsic dexterity and region-based planning.
We also use the same mechanism for haptic-based recognition.
This research is conducted in collaboration with Yale
University, Imperial College London, and Max Planck Institute
Related Publications
Region-Based Planning for 3D Within-Hand-Manipulation via Variable Friction Robot Fingers and Extrinsic Contacts
A. Sahin, A. J. Spiers, B. Calli
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021.
[Paper] [Video]
Haptic Object Parameter Extraction during Within-Hand- Manipulation with a Simple Robot Gripper
D. Mohtasham, G. Narayanan, B. Calli, A. J. Spiers,
IEEE Haptics Symposium, 2020.
[Paper]
J. Spiers, A. S. Morgan, K. Srinivasan, B. Calli, A. Dollar,
“Using a Variable-Friction Robot Hand to Determine Proprioceptive Features for Object Classification during Within-Hand-Manipulation”,
IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 2019.
[Paper] [Video]
Using a Variable-Friction Robot Hand to Determine Proprioceptive Features for Object Classification during Within-Hand-Manipulation,
A. J. Spiers, A. S. Morgan, K. Srinivasan, B. Calli, A. Dollar,
IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 2019.
[Paper] [Video]