In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation of Piecewise-Smooth 3-D Objects

Abstract

We present an algorithm called finger tracking for in-hand manipulation of three-dimensional objects with independent robot fingers. We describe and analyze the differential control for finger tracking and extend it to on-line continuous control for a set of cooperating robot fingers. We show experimental data from a simulation. Finally, we discuss global control issues for finger tracking, and compute lower bounds for reorientation by finger tracking. Our algorithm is computationally efficient, exact, and takes into consideration the full dynamics of the system.