Motion planning for intelligent manipulations by sliding and rotating operations with parallel two-fingered grippers

Humans have numerous manipulation skills which they can intelligently combine to execute tasks. The authors have developed motion planning systems for intelligent manipulations using parallel two-fingered grippers. They propose a new method to integrate these motion planning systems. The basic idea of this method is the state-space approach which is described in states and operators and solves problems by searching state-space from initial state to goal state. The operators correspond to the primitive manipulation skills and transform a state into another state. This method was applied to a manipulator equipped with a parallel two-fingered gripper. The key idea behind this application is to augment the handling ability of a parallel two-fingered gripper, instead of developing a difficult and complicated control method that uses a sophisticated but weak multifingered gripper. To actually implement this idea, we have developed a new, small and simple mechanism attached to a parallel two-fingered gripper