We introduce a reconfigurable underactuated robot hand able to perform systematic prehensile in-hand manipulations regardless of object size or shape. The utilizes two-degree-of-freedom five-bar linkage as the palm gripper, with three three-phalanx fingers, jointly controlled by single actuator, connected mobile revolute joints palm. Three actuators are used in system total, one for controlling...

Based on the recent theoretical development for formation control of multiple fully actuated agents with an elliptical shape in Do (2011), this paper develops distributed controllers that force a group of N underactuated ships with limited communication ranges to perform a desired formation, and guarantee no collisions between any ships in the group. The ships are first fitted to elliptical dis...

A time-varying feedback control law including integral action is developed for the control of an underactuated ship. Exponential stability is proved, and experimental results are presented.

In this paper we explore state-of-the-art underactuated, compliant robot gripper designs through looking at their performance on a generic grasping task. Starting from a state of the art open gripper design, we propose design modifications, and importantly, evaluate all designs on a grasping experiment involving a selection of objects resulting in 3600 object-gripper interactions. Interested in...

This paper studies the force capability of a particular class of underactuated fingers. Force capability is defined as the ability to create an external wrench onto a fixed object. The concept of underactuation in robotic fingers, with fewer actuators than degrees of freedom (DOF) through the use of springs and mechanical limits, allows the hand to adjust itself to an irregularly shaped object ...

This paper presents a theoretical framework for the dynamics and control of underactuated mechanical systems, defined as systems with fewer inputs than degrees of freedom. Control system formulation of underactuated mechanical systems is addressed and a class of underactuated systems characterized by nonintegrable dynamics relations is identified. Controllability and stabilizability results are...

An analysis of underactuated manipulators from both the dynamic and control points of view is presented. While the unactuated joints dynamic equation is recognized to be a nonholonomic constraint in the general case, necessary and sufficient conditions are given to identify special cases in which such a constraint is integrable. In contrast to most examples in the literature, the unactuated joi...

Underactuated manipulation is the process of controlling several object degrees-of-freedom with fewer robot actuators. Underactuated manipulation allows us to build dexterous robots with only a few actuators. In this paper we explore the possibility of useful dynamic manipulation with only a single actuator. Our case study is a ball rolling in an asymmetrical bowl which can be accelerated along...

The zero dynamics of a hybrid model of bipedal walking are introduced and studied for a class of N-link, planar robots with one degree of underactuation and outputs that depend only on the configuration variables. Asymptotically stable solutions of the zero dynamics correspond to asymptotically stabilizable orbits of the full hybrid model of the walker. The Poincaré map of the zero dynamics is ...