8 accepted papers
Humanoid robotic hands need to be versatile and capable of providing environmental information in order to serve as a platform for intelligent grasp control. To facilitate the design process of such hands, we present the KIT Robotic Hands. They have been designed to meet diverse application requirem
Grasping with five-fingered humanoid hands is a complex control problem. Throughout the entire grasping motion, all finger joints need to be coordinated to achieve a stable grasp. Grasp synergies provide a simplified, low-dimensional representation of grasp postures and motions, that can be used for…
In contrast to humans and animals who naturally execute seamless motions, learning and smoothly executing sequences of actions remains a challenge in robotics. This letter introduces a novel skill-agnostic framework that learns to sequence and blend skills based on differentiable optimization. Our a
Humans can intuitively grasp objects of different shape and weight. Throughout the grasp execution they control and coordinate the grasp forces at all contact points between the hand and the object to achieve a stable grasp. Dexterous grasping with humanoid hands relies on the perfect coordination b…
We present a novel underactued humanoid five finger soft hand, the KIT Finger-Vision Soft Hand, which is equipped with cameras in the fingertips and integrates a high performance embedded system for visual processing and control. We describe the actuation mechanism of the hand and the tendon-driven…
The development and control of prosthetic hands is an active research area and recently progress in mechatronics, sensor integration and innovative control has been made. However, integration of different components into a prosthetic hand remains challenging due to space constraints, the requirement…
Dual-arm continuum robots have been considered mainly for teleoperation, where human perception and cognition permitted coordination, and collision-free motions. This letter describes theoretical investigations on automation of dual-arm robots constituted of two concentric tube continuum manipulator
Tendon-driven continuum robots possess versatile application capabilities and have a robust design. The actuation of such robots with non-straight tendons that wrap around the backbone, described by a variable function, offers a lot of untapped potentials. While it has been shown that these continuu…