A Generic Motion Planner for Robot Multi-fingered Manipulation

This paper addresses the dexterous manipulation-planning problem, which deals with motion planning for multi-fingered hand manipulating objects among static obstacles, under quasi-static movement assumption. We propose a general manipulation approach capable to compute object and finger trajectories as well as the finger relocation sequence, in order to link any two given configurations of the composite system hand+object. It relies on a topological property that characterizes the existence of solutions in the subspace of configurations where the object is grasped by the n fingers. This property leads to reduce the problem by structuring the search space. The developed planner captures in a probabilistic roadmap the connectivity of sub-manifolds of the composite configuration space. The answer of the manipulation planning query is then given by searching a path in the computed graph. Simulation experiments are reported for different multi-fingered manipulation task examples showing the efficiency of the proposed method. keywords: manipulation planning, multi-fingered manipulation, finger gaiting, grasp computation, motion planning