7 accepted papers
This letter presents a novel benchmark called the Asterisk Test that characterizes a hand’s ability to translate an object on a table in eight linear directions using only two fingers. The benchmark is agnostic to the controller, object, and robot hand used. The benchmark also enables a measure of t
Grasping a simple object from the side is easy — unless the object is almost as big as the hand or space constraints require positioning the robot hand awkwardly with respect to the object. We show that humans — when faced with this challenge — adopt coordinated finger movements which enable them to…
In this paper we define two feature representations for grasping. These representations capture hand-object geometric relationships at the near-contact stage - before the fingers close around the object. Their benefits are: 1) They are stable under noise in both joint and pose variation. 2) They are…
This paper presents an online data collection method that captures human intuition about what grasp types are preferred for different fundamental object shapes and sizes. Survey questions are based on an adopted taxonomy that combines grasp pre-shape, approach, wrist orientation, object shape, orien…
We present a human-subjects study approach that supports the analysis of the manipulation performance of robotic hands that have the same morphology but different actuation and compliance. Specifically, we use this approach to analyze three different types of hands (one underactuated, one fully actu…
3-D printing silicone has been a long sought for goal by roboticists. Fused deposition manufacturing (FDM) is a readily accessible and simple 3-D printing scheme that could hold the key to printing silicone. This study details an approach to 3-D print silicone elastomer through use of a thickening a
Soft Pneumatic Actuators (SPAs) have recently become popular for use as fingers in robotic hands because of their inherent compliance, low cost, and ease of construction. We seek to overcome two key limitations which limit SPAs' abilities to grasp and manipulate objects: 1) Current SPAs lack positio