Control of Grasping and Manipulation of an Object with Soft Finger-tips

Abstract

This paper considers grasping and manipulation of an object by two-fingered robot hand with soft finger-tips. Each finger has two degrees of freedom, and the motion of the object is assumed to be in a plane. We first provide a formulation of the soft finger-tips, and derive the equations of motion of the whole system. For the system, we propose a method to regulate the motion of the object and the internal force with the information of the hand, the finger-tips and the object. We also consider the case where the information concerning the finger-tips and the object is replaced by its estimates from the information of the hand. In this case, we show that the motion of the object and the internal force is converged with some steady-state error caused by the estimation error. Numerical simulations and experiments are shown to prove the efficiency.