In this paper, we present the design, simulation and experimental validation of a control architecture for a flying hand, i.e., a system made of an unmanned aerial vehicle, a robotic manipulator and a gripper, which is grasping an object fixed on a vertical wall. The goal of this work is to show that the overall control allows the flying hand to approach the wall, to dock on the object by means...

We propose a new reconngurable gripper that consists of two parallel plates whose distance can be adjusted by a computer-controlled actuator. The bottom plate is a bare plane, and the top plate carries a rectangular grid of actuated pins that can translate in discrete increments under computer control. We propose to use this gripper to immobilize objects through frictionless contacts with three...

We study various classes of polyhedra that can be clamped using parallel jaw grippers. We show that all n-vertex convex polyhedra can be clamped regardless of the gripper size and present an O(n+k) time algorithm to compute all positions of a polyhedron that allow a valid clamp where k is the number of antipodal pairs of features. We also observe that all terrain polyhedra and orthogonal polyhe...

Robotic microhandling is disturbed by the adhesion phenomenon between the micro-object and the grippers. This phenomenon is directly linked to both the object and the gripper surface chemical composition. We propose to control adhesion by using chemical self-assembly monolayer (SAM) on both surfaces. Previous distance-force measurements done with AFM have shown that the liquid pH can be used to...

When parts to be handled are less than one millimeter in size, adhesive forces between gripper and object can be signiicant compared to gravitational forces. These adhesive forces arise primarily from surface tension , Van der Waals, and electrostatic attractions and can be a fundamental limitation to part handling in a gas environment. While it is possible to fabricate miniature versions of co...

This paper addresses the issue of path planning in a virtual environment (VE) for the control of an Internet-based robot manipulator. A hybrid method is proposed in which the dimension of the path-planning problem is reduced by separating the problem of planning the position of the gripper from that of planning the pose of the gripper. A global configuration-space technique is used for the form...

For many industrial parts, their natural resting pose differs from the orientation desired for assembly. We have found that it is possible in many cases to compensate for this difference using a parallel-jaw gripper with fixed orientation. The idea is to arrange contact points on each gripper jaw so that the part is reoriented as it is grasped. We analyze the mechanics of compensatory grasping ...

A problem’s representation has a big impact on how hard a problem is to solve, ranging from easy to solve to intractable. We describe a framework for meta-level search through a space of problem representations. These new problem representations are not predefined but are generated using a set of transformations. We define a set of component transformations and describe a case study of a single...