Visual hand gesture based interfaces have been widely used for navigation of virtual environments and control of a robot arm in robotic systems. In fact, hand movement has abundant powers of expression with complex finger joint motions. In this paper, the full degree-of-freedom hand motion is tracked in a vision-based mode towards natural and intuitive control of a dexterous robotic hand. The m...

We introduce two types of dexterous locomotion robots and their controller design approaches. One is a simplified two-link robot ‘‘Brachiator II’’. This is an example of an underactuated system where a robot mechanism has higher degrees of freedom than actuators. The desired motions are encoded as the output of a target dynamical system inspired by the pendulum-link motion of an ape’s brachiati...

Service robots operating in unconstrained environments like our homes need to be able to grasp and manipulate all kinds of objects, even if they are not known in advance. While many common approaches for grasping rely on detailed geometric models of the objects to perform a grasp optimization process in simulated scenes, we propose a model-free approach which relies on tactile feedback and coar...

Early in calendar year 2004, TPG Applied Technology will deliver two manipulator systems to the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for use as remote maintenance systems when the SNS becomes operational in 2006. One of these manipulator systems will be a boom system mounted on a pedestal with a dual-arm dexterous manipulator mounted on the end of the stick. The othe...

NASA's latest anthropomorphic robot, Robonaut, has reached a milestone in its capability. This highly dexterous robot, designed to assist astronauts in space, is now performing complex tasks at the Johnson Space Center that could previously only be carried out by humans. With 43 degrees of freedom, Robonaut is the first humanoid built for space and incorporates technology advances in dexterous ...

Dexterous manipulation is a challenging and important problem in robotics. While data-driven methods are promising approach, current benchmarks require simulation or extensive engineering support due to the sample inefficiency of popular methods. We present for TriFinger system, an open-source robotic platform dexterous focus 2020 Real Robot Challenge. The benchmarked methods, which were succes...