Humans use all surfaces of the hand for contact-rich manipulation. Robot hands, in contrast, typically use only the fingertips, which can limit dexterity. In this work, we leveraged a potential energy–based whole-hand manipulation model, which does not depend on contact wrench modeling like traditional approaches, to design a robotic manipulator. Inspired by robotic caging grasps and the high levels of dexterity observed in human manipulation, a metric was developed and used in conjunction with the manipulation model to design a two-fingered dexterous hand, the Model W. This was accomplished by simulating all planar finger topologies composed of open kinematic chains of up to three serial revolute and prismatic joints, forming symmetric two-fingered hands, and evaluating their performance according to the metric. We present the best design, an unconventional robot hand capable of performing continuous object reorientation, as well as repeatedly alternating between power and pinch grasps—two contact-rich skills that have often eluded robotic hands—and we experimentally characterize the hand’s manipulation capability. This hand realizes manipulation motions reminiscent of thumb–index finger manipulative movement in humans, and its topology provides the foundation for a general-purpose dexterous robot hand.
The Elliott and Connolly Benchmark: A Test for Evaluating the In-Hand Dexterity of Robot Hands
Achieving dexterous in-hand manipulation with robot hands is an extremely challenging problem, in part due to current limitations in hardware design. One notable bottleneck hampering the development of improved hardware for dexterous manipulation is the lack of a standardized benchmark for evaluating in-hand dexterity. In order to address this issue, we establish a new benchmark for evaluating in- hand dexterity, specifically for humanoid type robot hands: the Elliott and Connolly Benchmark. This benchmark is based on a classification of human manipulations established by Elliott and Connolly, and consists of 13 distinct in-hand manipulation patterns. We define qualitative and quantitative metrics for evaluation of the benchmark, and provide a detailed testing protocol. Additionally, we introduce a dexterous robot hand - the CMU Foam Hand III - which is evaluated using the benchmark, successfully completing 10 of the 13 manipulation patterns and outperforming human hand baseline results for several of the patterns.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1925130
- PAR ID:
- 10293197
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEERAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots
- ISSN:
- 2164-0572
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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