Kinematics of Grasping and Manipulation of Curved Surface Object with Robotic Hand

Kinematics of grasping and manipulation by a multi-fingered robotic hand where multi-fingertip surfaces are in contact with an object is solved. The surface of the object was represented by B-spline surfaces in order to model the objects of various shapes. The fingers were modeled by cylindrical links and a half ellipsoid fingertip. Geometric equations of contact locations have been solved for all possible contact combinations between the fingertip surface and the object. The simulation system calculated joint displacements and contact locations for a given trajectory of the object. Since there axe no closed form solutions for contact or intersection between these surfaces, kinematics of grasping was solved by recursive numerical calculation. The initial estimate of the contact point was obtained by approximating the B-spline surface to a polyhedron. As for the simulation of manipulation, exact contact locations were updated by solving the contact equations according to the given contact states such as pure rolling, twist-rolling or slide-twist-rolling. Several simulation examples of grasping and manipulation are presented.