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Ravi Balasubramanian

10 accepted papers

2024

The Grasp Reset Mechanism: An Automated Apparatus for Conducting Grasping Trials

ICRA 2024poster

Advancing robotic grasping and manipulation requires the ability to test algorithms and/or train learning models on large numbers of grasps. Towards the goal of more advanced grasping, we present the Grasp Reset Mechanism (GRM), a fully automated apparatus for conducting large-scale grasping trials.…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

Hand Design Approach for Planar Fully Actuated Manipulators

IROS 2023poster

Robotic in-hand manipulation increases the capability of robotic hands to interact with the world. The amount of manipulation that a robot is capable of is highly dependent on the design of the robot hand, and previous works have shown success in designing hands to improve performance for different…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2022

Benchmarking a Robot Hand's Ability to Translate Objects Using Two Fingers

RA-L 2022

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

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2021

Improving Grasp Classification through Spatial Metrics Available from Sensors

ICRA 2021poster

We present a method for classifying the quality of near-contact grasps using spatial metrics that are recoverable from sensor data. Current methods often rely on calculating precise contact points, which are difficult to calculate in real life, or on tactile sensors or image data, which may be unava…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2020

Benchmarking Protocol for Grasp Planning Algorithms

RA-L 2020

Numerous grasp planning algorithms have been proposed since the 1980s. The grasping literature has expanded rapidly in recent years, building on greatly improved vision systems and computing power. Methods have been proposed to plan stable grasps on known objects (exact 3D model is available), famil

Cited by 44SourceScholar
2019

Near-contact grasping strategies from awkward poses: When simply closing your fingers is not enough

IROS 2019poster

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…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2019

Using Geometric Features to Represent Near-Contact Behavior in Robotic Grasping

ICRA 2019poster

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…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2018

Grasping Objects Big and Small: Human Heuristics Relating Grasp-Type and Object Size

ICRA 2018poster

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…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2018

Using human studies to analyze capabilities of underactuated and compliant hands in manipulation tasks

IROS 2018poster

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…

Cited by 11SourceScholar