Coordination of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Degrees of Freedom in Soft Robotic Grasping
We demonstrate that moving the wrist while the fingers perform a grasp increases performance. The coordination shapes the interactions between the fingers, the object and its environment to extend the hand capabilities (e.g. higher payload and precision) We evaluated our hypothesis with a human grasping study where the volunteers grasped objects by moving the soft RBO Hand 2 while its fingers closed in a predefined motion. We limited their ability to coordinate their motion with the finger movements using a compliant robot attached to the hand, and observed that their grasp success decreases with increased constraints. We also successfully transferred one of the observed movement patterns to the robot, indicating that adaptive intrinsic/extrinsic motion increases robotic grasp performance as well.
2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)