ITL October 1996, a research and development task um initiated at JPL to develop and demonstrate nonlinear contact control schemes for the dexterous robotic arms planned for the Space Station. This paper reports on the progress made to-date in this task. Specifically, the paper introduces a new class of contact controllers comprised of a nonlinear gain in cascade with a linear jixedgain PIforce...

Quickly and accurately extracting information about a touched object's orientation is a critical aspect of dexterous object manipulation. However, the speed and acuity of tactile edge orientation processing with respect to the fingertips as reported in previous perceptual studies appear inadequate in these respects. Here we directly establish the tactile system's capacity to process edge-orient...

Tactile sensors play an important role in robotics manipulation to perform dexterous and complex tasks. This paper presents a novel control framework to perform dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robotic hands using feedback data from tactile and visual sensors. This control framework permits the definition of new visual controllers which allow the path tracking of the object motion tak...

We aim at planning multi-contact sequences of stances and postures for humanoid robots. The output sequence defines the contact transitions that allow our robot to realize different kind of tasks, ranging from biped locomotion to dexterous manipulation. The central component of the planning framework is a best-first algorithm that performs a search of the contacts to be added or removed at each...

This paper discusses dexterous, within-hand manipulation with differential-type underactuated hands. We discuss the fact that not only can this class of hands, which to date have been considered almost exclusively for adaptive grasping, be utilized for precision manipulation, but also that the reduction of the number of actuators and constraints can make within-hand manipulation easier to imple...

The range of human kinematic motion as well as force resolution should be known for design of a haptic device. In addition, a haptic interface can be designed more easily when master and slave devices are the same kinematically. However, human kinematic factors have not been analyzed and applied deeply because of their complexity. Although calibration techniques have been developed, there is a ...

An adaptive impedance control algorithm for tendon-driven dexterous hands is presented. The main idea of this algorithm is to compensate the output of the classical impedance control by an offset that is a proportion-integration-differentiation (PID) expression of force error. The adaptive impedance control can adjust the impedance parameters indirectly when the environment position and stiffne...

To investigate neural coding characteristics in the human primary somatosensory cortices, the cortical representation of two fingers with different levels of functional skill has been focused (the thumb –high dexterous– and the little finger –low dexterous–). The finger dexterity was scored by the Fingertip writing test. In the two hemispheres, dynamic neural synchronization was analysed in the...