A Three-Finger Gripper for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

A Three-Finger Gripper for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments

C. Francois, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Martial Hebert
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 3, pp. 2261 - 2265, April, 1991
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Abstract

This paper describes a gripper for manipulation in natural, un-structured environments. The specific manipulation task is to plck up surface material such as pebbles, or small rocks, in a natural terrain. The application is to give autonomous sampling capabilities to an autonomous vehicle for planetary exploration. We describe the task analysis process that led to the selection of a configuration with three "soft" fingers. We carry out a complete analysis of the stability of a grasp for this gripper including an analysis of the deformation of the fingers at the points of contact. Finally. we describe the implementation of a grasp selection algorithm and present results on three-dimensional representations of objects computed from range data.

BibTeX

@conference{Francois-1991-13243,
author = {C. Francois and Katsushi Ikeuchi and Martial Hebert},
title = {A Three-Finger Gripper for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {1991},
month = {April},
volume = {3},
pages = {2261 - 2265},
}
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