Abstract:
Most of the industrial robotic applications nowadays can only deal with pick-and-place manipulation, in which fixed graspings are the only interactions between the object and the robot hand. Simple hands, such as pinch grippers and suction cups, suffice to accomplish such tasks. However, there exist many unsolved automation problems where more dexterous manipulations are necessary. For example, in feeding/polishing for manufacturing, the 3D object must be placed at a certain position and orientation. In this talk, I will share my progresses and lessons learned on such problems. With innovations on robust force/motion control strategies and task-oriented hardware designs, we are able to solve several dexterous manipulation tasks with low-cost simple robot hands.

Committee:
Matt Mason (Advisor)
Chris Atkeson
Aaron Johnson
Ankit Bhatia