Externally sensorless dynamic regrasping and manipulation by a triple-fingered robotic hand with torsional fingertip joints

Abstract

This paper presents an improvement of our previously proposed dynamic object grasping and manipulation method. This method, which utilizes a dual-fingered hand of which each soft and hemispheric fingertip owns a torsional joint, has performed novel 3-dimensional dynamic object grasping and manipulation stably without the use of any external sensing device. However, several limitation and weakness have still remained in terms of dexterity and robustness. In order to improve it, firstly a triple-fingered hand is newly introduced instead of the dual-fingered hand to perform regrasping. Next, the previously proposed stable object grasping controller is adequately modified to perform dynamic regrasping during manipulation. Additionally, the virtual object attitude controller is also modified to improve its performance. Finally, several experiments are conducted by using a prototype, and the usefulness of proposed controller is demonstrated through these results.