Rolling Contact in Kinematics of Multifingered Robotic Hands

Abstract

Rolling contact has been used in fine-manipulation by robot hands. It provides an opportunity to manipulate an object to a desired location even when the finger linkages do not have enough degrees of freedom. This paper was aimed to provide a systematic approach to fine-manipulation of multifingered robot hands with rolling contact. We established a Jacobian of a multifingered hand with point contact and formulated the forward and inverse characteristic equations in terms of joint velocities and contact trajectories. The results of the forward kinematics are useful for simulation and off-line programming, and the results of the inverse kinematics provide direct inputs to a kinematic controller.