Minimalist, underactuated hand designs can be modified to produce useful, dexterous, in-hand capabilities without sacrificing their passive adaptability in power grasping. Incorporating insight from studies in parallel mechanisms, we implement and investigate the “spherical hand” morphologies: novel, hand topologies with two fingers configured such that the instantaneous screw axes, describing the displacement of the grasped object, always intersect at the same point relative to the palm. This produces the same instantaneous motion about a common point for any object geometry in a stable grasp. Various rotary fingertip designs are also implemented to help maintain stable contact conditions and minimize slip, in order to prove the feasibility of this design in physical hand implementations. The achievable precision manipulation workspaces of the proposed morphologies are evaluated and compared to prior human manipulation data as well as manipulation results with traditional three-finger hand topologies. Experiments suggest that the spherical hands' design modifications can make the system's passive reconfiguration more easily predictable, providing insight into the expected object workspace while minimizing the dependence on accurate object and contact modeling. We believe that this design can significantly reduce the complexity of planning and executing dexterous manipulation movements in unstructured environments with underactuated hands.
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December 2016
Research-Article
Spherical Hands: Toward Underactuated, In-Hand Manipulation Invariant to Object Size and Grasp Location
Raymond R. Ma,
Raymond R. Ma
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science,
Yale University,
9 Hillhouse Avenue,
New Haven, CT 06511
e-mail: raymond.ma@yale.edu
Yale University,
9 Hillhouse Avenue,
New Haven, CT 06511
e-mail: raymond.ma@yale.edu
Search for other works by this author on:
Nicolas Rojas,
Nicolas Rojas
Department of Engineering and Design,
School of Engineering and Informatics,
University of Sussex,
Brighton BN1 9QT, UK
School of Engineering and Informatics,
University of Sussex,
Brighton BN1 9QT, UK
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Aaron M. Dollar
Aaron M. Dollar
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science,
Yale University,
15 Prospect Street,
New Haven, CT 06520
e-mail: aaron.dollar@yale.edu
Yale University,
15 Prospect Street,
New Haven, CT 06520
e-mail: aaron.dollar@yale.edu
Search for other works by this author on:
Raymond R. Ma
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science,
Yale University,
9 Hillhouse Avenue,
New Haven, CT 06511
e-mail: raymond.ma@yale.edu
Yale University,
9 Hillhouse Avenue,
New Haven, CT 06511
e-mail: raymond.ma@yale.edu
Nicolas Rojas
Department of Engineering and Design,
School of Engineering and Informatics,
University of Sussex,
Brighton BN1 9QT, UK
School of Engineering and Informatics,
University of Sussex,
Brighton BN1 9QT, UK
Aaron M. Dollar
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science,
Yale University,
15 Prospect Street,
New Haven, CT 06520
e-mail: aaron.dollar@yale.edu
Yale University,
15 Prospect Street,
New Haven, CT 06520
e-mail: aaron.dollar@yale.edu
Manuscript received March 24, 2016; final manuscript received September 5, 2016; published online October 25, 2016. Assoc. Editor: Leila Notash.
J. Mechanisms Robotics. Dec 2016, 8(6): 061021 (12 pages)
Published Online: October 25, 2016
Article history
Received:
March 24, 2016
Revised:
September 5, 2016
Citation
Ma, R. R., Rojas, N., and Dollar, A. M. (October 25, 2016). "Spherical Hands: Toward Underactuated, In-Hand Manipulation Invariant to Object Size and Grasp Location." ASME. J. Mechanisms Robotics. December 2016; 8(6): 061021. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4034787
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