3D in-hand manipulation planning

Abstract

This paper describes a global motion planner for dextrous manipulation of 3D objects by a multifingered robotic hand. We focus on the reconfiguration problem: find a feasible quasi-static trajectory (motions and contact forces) that moves a hand-object system from an initial grasp to a final desired configuration of the object. The planner is designed as a two-level process: a global level that expands a tree of sub-goals in the configuration space of the object, and a local level that searches for feasible quasi-static trajectories of the entire manipulation system between adjacent sub-goals. A key feature of the planner is that it exploits the redundancy of the system by using, in a complementary way, different canonical manipulation modes and tackles the high dimensionality of the solution space (configuration and control spaces) by making use, instantaneously, of a random search over it. The planner is applied in simulation for achieving several nontrivial reconfiguration tasks for (piecewise-) smooth convex objects demonstrating the promise of our approach.