Planning and error compensation for finite manipulation of soft-fingered hands

A hierarchical planning strategy for dextrous manipulation of multifingered hands with soft finger contact model is proposed. Dextrous manipulation planning can be divided into a high-level stage which specifies the position/orientation trajectories of the finger-tips on the object and a low-level stage which determines the contact forces and joint trajectories for the fingers. In the low-level stage, various nonlinear optimization problems are formulated according to the contact modes and integrated into a manipulation planning algorithm to find contact forces and joint velocities at each time step. Montana's contact equations (1988) are used for the high-level planning. A real-time compensation tactics to eliminate the trajectory errors of the object resulted from various uncertainties are also developed. Simulation results are presented and illustrated by employing a three-fingered hand manipulating a sphere to demonstrate the validity of the proposed strategy.<>