Region-Based Planning for a 3D In-Hand Manipulation Platform Leveraging Variable Friction Fingers and External Surfaces

Sahin, Alp

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Region-Based Planning for a 3D In-Hand Manipulation Platform Leveraging Variable Friction Fingers and External Surfaces

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Existing robotic in-hand manipulation approaches generally utilize complex hand designs or extrinsic dexterity based strategies via dynamic models of contact. Still, they can only accomplish limited object motion. This work combines a simple robot hand with variable friction fingers and extrinsic dexterity based strategies to achieve 3D in-hand manipulation. Leveraging variable friction mechanism, we implement manipulation actions (i.e. within-hand sliding, rotation and pivoting) in a quasi-static manner, using kinematic level formulations. For a suitable representation of daily manipulation tasks, a region-based in-hand manipulation problem is proposed. An in-hand manipulation planner utilizing an A* algorithm with a novel region-based heuristic is developed to solve for a sequence of manipulation actions that navigate the contact patches between the hand and the object surface to desired regions. A wide range of goal regions can be achieved via this approach, which is demonstrated through simulated and real robot experiments following a standardized in-hand manipulation benchmarking protocol.

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