7 accepted papers
This paper describes a method for steering flexible linear objects using two robot hands in environments populated by sparsely spaced obstacles. The approach involves manipulating an elastic inextensible rod by varying the gripping endpoint positions and tangents. Closed form solutions that describe…
This paper considers progressively more demanding off-line shortest path sensory coverage problems in an optimization framework. In the first problem, a robot finds the shortest path to cover a set of target nodes with its sensors. Because this mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem (MINLP) is…
Successful grasping of objects with robotic hands is still considered a difficult task. One aspect of the grasping problem is the physical contact interaction between the robotic fingertips and the object. Friction at the fingertip contacts can improve grasp robustness, but frictional fingertips may
Multifinger caging offers a robust object grasping approach. While efficient computation of two-finger caging grasps is well developed, the computation of three-finger caging grasps has remained a challenging open problem. This letter considers the caging of polygonal objects with three-finger hands
This paper suggests a novel method for a mobile robot to plan its path towards a target through an unknown environment, using sensors to discover new obstacles along the way. The method synthesizes an artificial temperature gradient throughout the known environment by numerically solving the heat co
The classical definition and analysis of force closure in robotic grasping focuses only on the fingertip bodies and their contacts with the grasped object. However, the kinematic properties of the hand mechanism can have a non-trivial effect on the actual type of force closure which can be realized
This paper studies cages of convex polygonal objects using three point fingers. The fingers are said to cage the object when it is impossible to move the object arbitrarily far from its initial placement without penetrating the fingers. We consider a three-parameter model of the relative position of…