Practical motion planning for dextrous re-orientation of polyhedra

This paper addresses the motion planning problem for dextrous manipulation by an artificial multifingered hand. We focus on the task of re-orienting polyhedral objects and present a practical motion planner for achieving quasistatic manipulations by a four-fingered hand. The planner makes use of a simple manipulation strategy in which a single finger is moved and the other three are fixed. We describe how this scenario is exploited for reducing the space of trajectory solutions and used within a two-level incremental process to search for global re-orientation motions. The planner has been implemented and used for achieving several complex re-orientation tasks with frictional and frictionless contacts that show the practicality of our approach.