Design and Control of Roller Grasper V2 for In-Hand Manipulation
This addresses the challenge of enabling robots to perform sophisticated tasks requiring object repositioning and reorientation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing grasper concepts with specific mechanical improvements.
The paper tackled the unsolved problem of in-hand manipulation by designing a non-anthropomorphic robot grasper with active spherical rolling fingertips, which successfully manipulated objects using both handcrafted and learned control schemes in simulation and on hardware.
The ability to perform in-hand manipulation still remains an unsolved problem; having this capability would allow robots to perform sophisticated tasks requiring repositioning and reorienting of grasped objects. In this work, we present a novel non-anthropomorphic robot grasper with the ability to manipulate objects by means of active surfaces at the fingertips. Active surfaces are achieved by spherical rolling fingertips with two degrees of freedom (DoF) -- a pivoting motion for surface reorientation -- and a continuous rolling motion for moving the object. A further DoF is in the base of each finger, allowing the fingers to grasp objects over a range of size and shapes. Instantaneous kinematics was derived and objects were successfully manipulated both with a custom handcrafted control scheme as well as one learned through imitation learning, in simulation and experimentally on the hardware.