In this paper, we present an overview of our work in the development, realization, dynamic analysis, and simulation of an innovative sensing method for the prevention of object slip during robotic grasping and manipulation. The new sensor is biologically inspired, and measures the extension of a rubber skin to detect impending slip before it occurs, and to provide feedback for active control of...

In many applications, the manipulations require only part of the degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the end-effector, or some DOFs are more important than the rest. We name these applications prioritized manipulations. The end-effector’s DOFs are divided into those which are critical and must be controlled as precisely as possible, and those which have loose specifications, so their tracking performa...

In this paper, we design planar nR serial chains that provide one degree-of-freedom movement for an end-effector through five arbitrarily specified task positions. These chains are useful for deployment linkages or the fingers of a mechanical hand. The trajectory of the end-effector pivot is controlled by n-1 sets of cables that are joined through a planetary gear system to two input variables....

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...

The paper presents an advanced stiffness modeling technique for perfect and non-perfect parallel manipulators under internal and external loadings. Particular attention is paid to the manipulators composed of non-perfect serial chains, whose geometrical parameters differ from the nominal ones and do not allow to assemble manipulator without internal stresses that considerably affect the stiffne...

As a step towards systems that can acquire knowledge automatically we have designed a system that can learn new objects with a minimum of user interaction and implemented it on our robot platform GripSee [1]. A novel object is placed into the robot’s gripper in order to define a default orientation and a default grip. The robot then places the object on a turning table and builds up a visual re...

One of the basic tasks a robot has to perform is to manipulate objects. For macroscopic applications mechanical grippers usually grasp the workpiece. Because of the different scaling of gravity and adhesion such tools are no more suitable in micro manipulation. A better strategy is to use adhesion forces or vacuum. Therefore, after a brief introduction to adhesion phenomenons this paper focuses...

This paper is a summary of the recently accomplished research work on flexible gripping systems. The goal is to develop a gripper which can be used for a great amount of geometrically variant workpieces. The economic aspect is of particular importance during the whole development. The high flexibility of the gripper is obtained by three parallel used principles. These are human and computer bas...

A new hybrid force-position control method for uncertain robotic manipulator interacting with its environment is presented. First, the dynamical model system in the compliance frame is derives from the usual joint frame model and leads to two sets of equations due to the constraint associated to the contact surface. Next, the two dynamics are separately used for the synthesis of position and fo...

In [19] we specified robot grippers that can orient and grasp parts with an arrangement of trapezoidal jaw modules. Since jaw modules may be imprecisely machined, we define a parametric tolerance class such that part alignment is guaranteed for all jaw geometry in the class. This tolerance class is derived based on analysis of toppling, motion trajectory, and form-closure. Given maximal jaw geo...