Manipulation Capabilities with Simple Hands - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Manipulation Capabilities with Simple Hands

Conference Paper, Proceedings of 12th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER '10), pp. 285 - 299, December, 2010

Abstract

A simple hand is a robotic gripper that trades off generality in function for practicality in design and control. The long-term goal of our work is to explore that tradeoff and demonstrate broad manipulation capabilities with simple hands. This paper describes two prototype simple hands. Both hands have thin cylindrical fingers arranged symmetrically around a low friction circular palm. The fingers are compliantly coupled to a single actuator. Our experiments with both hands in a bin-picking scenario demonstrate that we can achieve robust grasp classification and in-hand localization using simple statistical techniques. We further show how the classification accuracy increases as the grasp proceeds by exploiting information obtained online. We finally evaluate the relative importance of observing the full state of the hand rather than just observing the state of the actuators.

BibTeX

@conference{Rodriguez-2010-10585,
author = {Alberto Rodriguez and Matthew T. Mason and Siddhartha Srinivasa},
title = {Manipulation Capabilities with Simple Hands},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 12th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER '10)},
year = {2010},
month = {December},
pages = {285 - 299},
keywords = {Hand design, simple hand, grasping, bin picking},
}