We consider the problem of in-hand dexterous manipulation with a focus on unknown or uncertain hand–object parameters, such as hand configuration, object pose within hand, and contact positions. In particular, in this work we formulate a generic framework for hand–object configuration estimation using underactuated hands as an example. Owing to the passive reconfigurability and the lack of encoders in the hand’s joints, it is challenging to estimate, plan, and actively control underactuated manipulation. By modeling the grasp constraints, we present a particle filter-based framework to estimate the hand configuration. Specifically, given an arbitrary grasp, we start by sampling a set of hand configuration hypotheses and then randomly manipulate the object within the hand. While observing the object’s movements as evidence using an external camera, which is not necessarily calibrated with the hand frame, our estimator calculates the likelihood of each hypothesis to iteratively estimate the hand configuration. Once converged, the estimator is used to track the hand configuration in real time for future manipulations. Thereafter, we develop an algorithm to precisely plan and control the underactuated manipulation to move the grasped object to desired poses. In contrast to most other dexterous manipulation approaches, our framework does not require any tactile sensing or joint encoders, and can directly operate on any novel objects, without requiring a model of the object a priori. We implemented our framework on both the Yale Model O hand and the Yale T42 hand. The results show that the estimation is accurate for different objects, and that the framework can be easily adapted across different underactuated hand models. In the end, we evaluated our planning and control algorithm with handwriting tasks, and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
more »
« less
Within-Hand Manipulation Planning and Control for Variable Friction Hands
In this work, we present three vision-based within-hand manipulation methods for a variable friction hand. The system is able to plan and execute actions such as in-hand sliding and large object rotation, which are required for many within-hand manipulation tasks. We present an experimental study using objects with various geometries, and show that all the methods can reliably achieve given target object poses. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed methods with respect to positioning accuracy and efficiency.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1900953
- PAR ID:
- 10229713
- Editor(s):
- Siciliano, B; Laschi, C; Khatib, O.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Symposium on Experimental Robotics
- Volume:
- 19
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 600-610
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This work proposes a framework for tracking a desired path of an object held by an adaptive hand via within-hand manipulation. Such underactuated hands are able to passively achieve stable contacts with objects. Combined with vision-based control and data-driven state estimation process, they can solve tasks without accurate hand-object models or multi-modal sensory feedback. In particular, a data-driven regression process is used here to estimate the probability of dropping the object for given manipulation states. Then, an optimization-based planner aims to track the desired path while avoiding states that are above a threshold probability of dropping the object. The optimized cost function, based on the principle of Dynamic-Time Warping (DTW), seeks to minimize the area between the desired and the followed path. By adapting the threshold for the probability of dropping the object, the framework can handle objects of different weights without retraining. Experiments involving writing letters with a marker, as well as tracing randomized paths, were conducted on the Yale Model T-42 hand. Results indicate that the framework successfully avoids undesirable states, while minimizing the proposed cost function, thereby producing object paths for within-hand manipulation that closely match the target ones.more » « less
-
During in-hand manipulation, robots must be able to continuously estimate the pose of the object in order to generate appropriate control actions. The performance of algorithms for pose estimation hinges on the robot's sensors being able to detect discriminative geometric object features, but previous sensing modalities are unable to make such measurements robustly. The robot's fingers can occlude the view of environment- or robot-mounted image sensors, and tactile sensors can only measure at the local areas of contact. Motivated by fingertip-embedded proximity sensors' robustness to occlusion and ability to measure beyond the local areas of contact, we present the first evaluation of proximity sensor based pose estimation for in-hand manipulation. We develop a novel two-fingered hand with fingertip-embedded optical time-of-flight proximity sensors as a testbed for pose estimation during planar in-hand manipulation. Here, the in-hand manipulation task consists of the robot moving a cylindrical object from one end of its workspace to the other. We demonstrate, with statistical significance, that proximity-sensor based pose estimation via particle filtering during in-hand manipulation: a) exhibits 50% lower average pose error than a tactile-sensor based baseline; b) empowers a model predictive controller to achieve 30% lower final positioning error compared to when using tactile-sensor based pose estimates.more » « less
-
Human demonstrations are important in a range of robotics applications, and are created with a variety of input methods. However, the design space for these input methods has not been extensively studied. In this paper, focusing on demonstrations of hand-scale object manipulation tasks to robot arms with two-finger grippers, we identify distinct usage paradigms in robotics that utilize human-to-robot demonstrations, extract abstract features that form a design space for input methods, and characterize existing input methods as well as a novel input method that we introduce, the instrumented tongs. We detail the design specifications for our method and present a user study that compares it against three common input methods: free-hand manipulation, kinesthetic guidance, and teleoperation. Study results show that instrumented tongs provide high quality demonstrations and a positive experience for the demonstrator while offering good correspondence to the target robot.more » « less
-
Many manipulation tasks, such as placement or within-hand manipulation, require the object’s pose relative to a robot hand. The task is difficult when the hand significantly occludes the object. It is especially hard for adaptive hands, for which it is not easy to detect the finger’s configuration. In addition, RGB-only approaches face issues with texture-less objects or when the hand and the object look similar. This paper presents a depth-based framework, which aims for robust pose estimation and short response times. The approach detects the adaptive hand’s state via efficient parallel search given the highest overlap between the hand’s model and the point cloud. The hand’s point cloud is pruned and robust global registration is performed to generate object pose hypotheses, which are clustered. False hypotheses are pruned via physical reasoning. The remaining poses’ quality is evaluated given agreement with observed data. Extensive evaluation on synthetic and real data demonstrates the accuracy and computational efficiency of the framework when applied on challenging, highly-occluded scenarios for different object types. An ablation study identifies how the framework’s components help in performance. This work also provides a dataset for in-hand 6D object pose esti- mation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github. com/wenbowen123/icra20-hand-object-posemore » « less
An official website of the United States government

