Automated Design of Manipulators For In-Hand Tasks

July 2018

Automated Design of Manipulators For In-Hand Tasks


Abstract:

Grasp planning and motion synthesis for dexterous manipulation tasks are traditionally done given a pre-existing kinematic model for the robotic hand. In this paper, we introduce a framework for automatically designing hand topologies best suited for manipulation tasks given high level objectives as input. Our goal is to ultimately design a program that is able to automatically design robotic hands that can perform a set of target tasks by leveraging their physical design to encourage robust manipulations. Our framework comprises of a sequence of trajectory optimizations chained together to translate a sequence of objective poses into an optimized hand mechanism along with a physically feasible motion plan involving both the constructed hand and the object. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by synthesizing a series of mechanical hand designs optimized to perform specified in-hand manipulation tasks of varying difficulty. We also briefly explore the feasibility of constructing multi-purpose hands from scratch that are meant to perform multiple primitive tasks in sequence

Notes:

@mastersthesis{Hazard-2018-107012,
author = {Christopher Hazard},
title = {Automated Design of Manipulators For In-Hand Tasks},
year = {2018},
month = {July},
school = {Carnegie Mellon University},
address = {Pittsburgh, PA},
number = {CMU-RI-TR-18-36},
keywords = {Robotic Manipulation, Computational Mechanism Design, Trajectory Optimization},
}
Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.