In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation of Piecewise-Smooth 3d Objects

We present an algorithmic control methodology called finger tracking for in-hand manipulation of three dimensional objects by independent robot fingers. We describe and analyze the differential control for finger tracking and show how it is used to generate on-line continuous control for the fingers. We show that the control for this problem reduces to solving a linear system of equations. We also analyze the structure of singularities for this problem and discuss how it relates to global control issues for finger tracking. Our result is a contribution towards defining high-level primitives for task-level manipulation with robots. 1 Introduction We wish for robots to perform sophisticated tasks in structured environments, such as an assembly line, as well as unstructured ones, such as space, undersea, or outdoors. Such robots must have the ability to manipulate objects. We consider task-directed programming to endow the robots with these capabilities. Specifically we are developing al..