Finger gaits planning for multifingered manipulation

A robotic hand may change its grasp status and relocate some of its fingers in order to perform a large scale manipulation. Such a strategy is called a finger gait. In this paper, a randomized manipulation planning algorithm is proposed to solving the finger gait planning problem. One of the most used finger gaiting primitives, finger substitution, is introduced. Because of its discrete-continuous characteristics, the kinematics model of a finger substitution is formulated into a hybrid automaton. Considering the discrete and continuous topology of the automaton, both the discrete metric and continuous metric are defined on the state space. An improved RRT based planner is proposed to find a feasible finger substitution. Finally, simulation results verify the validity of the proposed finger gait planner.