Dexterous manipulation planning for a planar whole-arm manipulation system

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Dexterous manipulation planning can be defined as the process of determining the control trajectories both in terms of joint displacements and efforts for an articulated mechanical hand, in such a way that, if executed, the hands can reconfigure the grasp into one which is known to be more desirable than the initial one. In this thesis, we implement a dexterous manipulation planning system for a generalized manipulation system in the planar case under a quasi-static mechanical model. The main contribution of this thesis is the application of classical cell-decomposition methods, coupled with joint-control mode partitioning to do the quasistatic motion prediction at each step of movement for both sliding and rolling contact when friction is involved or not, to dexterous manipulation planning. In our cell-decomposition method applied to the dexterous,planning, the system's C-space is decomposed into stability cells by using both forward and back projection methods in order to construct an interconnection of stability cells of various dimensions, from which a successful plan can be extracted by navigating through them using stability criteria. Results of the dexterous manipulation planning are given for a two-finger manipulation system as a case study for both frictionless and frictional cases by considering sliding and rolling contact as the possible . contact mode