A finite motion planning strategy for multifingered robotic hands considering sliding and rolling contacts

An algorithm for motion planning of the robotic hand to generate finite displacements and changes in orientation of objects by considering sliding contacts as well as rolling contacts between the fingertips and the object at the contact point is proposed. An optimization problem is formulated and solved to find minimum contact forces and minimum joint velocities to impart a desired motion to the object at each time step. The relative velocity at the contact point is found by calculating the velocities of the fingertip and the object at the contact point. Time derivatives of the surface variables and the contact angle of the fingertip and the object at the current time step are computed using Montana´s contact equation (1988) to find the contact parameters of the fingertip and the object at the next time step. To show the validity of the proposed algorithm, a numerical example is illustrated by employing the robotic hand to manipulate a sphere with three fingers, each of which has four joints