Dexterity through Rolling: Towards Manipulation of Unknown Objects

Abstract

. The nonholonomy exhibited by kinematic systems consisting of bodies rolling on top of each other can be used to the purpose of building dexterous mechanisms with a minimum hardware complication. Such desirable an engineering feature can be fully exploited, however, only if the capability of planning and controlling rolling motions of arbitrary objects is achieved. In this paper we present some results on the description of the set of reachable positions and orientations of manipulated objects of different shapes, along with some advances in realizing a robot hand system for manipulation of objects whose shape is not known a priori, but is reconstructed as manipulation proceeds. Key Words. Dextrous robot hands, Nonholonomic systems, differential geometric control. 1 Introduction Few recent works in mechanism design and robotics reported on the possibility of exploiting nonholonomic mechanical phenomena in order to design devices that achieve complex tasks with a reduced number of ac...