Dextrous manipulation by rolling and finger gaiting

Abstract

Many practical dextrous manipulation tasks involve large-scale motion of the grasped object while maintaining a stable grasp. To plan such task, one must control both the motion of the object and the contact locations, while also adhering to the workspace constraints typical of multi-fingered hands. We integrate the relevant theories of contact kinematics, nonholonomic motion planning, coordinated object manipulation, grasp stability and finger gaits to develop a general framework for dextrous manipulation planning. To illustrate our approach, the framework is applied to the problem of manipulating a sphere with three hemi-spherical fingertips. The simulation results are presented.