A compliant, underactuated hand for robust manipulation

Abstract

This paper introduces the i-HY Hand, an underactuated hand driven by 5 actuators that is capable of performing a wide range of grasping and in-hand manipulation tasks. This hand was designed to address the need for a durable, inexpensive, moderately dexterous hand suitable for use on mobile robots. The primary focus of this paper will be on the novel minimalistic design of i-HY, which was developed by choosing a set of target tasks around which the design of the hand was optimized. Particular emphasis is placed on the development of underactuated fingers that are capable of both firm power grasps and lowstiffness fingertip grasps using only the passive mechanics of the finger mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate successful grasping of a wide range of target objects, the stability of fingertip grasping, as well as the ability to adjust the force exerted on grasped objects using the passive finger mechanics.

Exploitation of Environmental Constraints in Human and Robotic Grasping

“…The SDM hand (Dollar and Howe, 2010), the Velo gripper (Ciocarlie et al, 2013), the i-HY hand (Odhner et al, 2014), and the Pisa/IIT SoftHand (Catalano et al, 2014) couple the actuation of degrees of freedom using tendonpulley systems, adapting the shape of the hand to the object while equalizing contact forces.…”

Exploring Dexterous Manipulation Workspaces with the iHY Hand

“…4 and 5 were reached by slipping as well as rolling along the fingertips. While slippage is often thought of as undesirable, in many cases it is unavoidable, and can be usefully exploited to transition an object into a desired grasp, for example, from a pinch grasp to a power grasp [1]. In the context of dexterous manipulation, the most important question is not whether the object slips, but rather whether the workspace of the object remains continuous despite slippage.…”

“…Fingers are also among the smallest and most fragile articulated links in a robot, as well as those most likely to make contact with the environment. In an effort to improve the capabilities of practical hands for experimentation, the authors have developed the iRobot-Harvard-Yale (iHY) hand in collaboration with iRobot Corporation and the Harvard BioRobotics Laboratory [1]. Aside from good grasping performance, which is present in a number of simplified or underactuated hands [2] [7], one key design goal of the iHY Hand was to enable dexterous, within-hand manipulation of grasped objects.…”

Developing an embodied gait on a compliant quadrupedal robot

“…The evolution towards compliance also extends to other parts of the robot as flexible materials are being used for structural parts of the robot. Examples of such robots are the quadrupedal robots Oncilla [6] and StarlETH [7], the i-HY hand, which consists of flexible fingers that can manipulate a wide variety of objects [8], and the tensegrity robot ReCTeR [9].…”