Structural synthesis of hands for grasping and manipulation tasks

Abstract

In the kinematic synthesis of multi-fingered robotic hands for a specific task, the selection of the hand topology is an important step. Considerable research efforts have been directed to the structural synthesis of hand topologies for satis fying grasping and manipulation metrics such as mobility and force closure. In this work, we develop a structural synthesis, isomorphism-free enumeration method that combines the solvability for rigid-body guidance with the grasping and manipula tion metrics, for general hands with a tree structure. An algorithmic implementation of the methodology is presented and illustrated with validation examples.