Stratified Motion Planning with Application to Robotic Finger Gaiting

This paper presents a general, nonholonomic dextrous manipulation and finger gaiting technique for robotic grasping problems. This method is general in that it is independent of the geometry of the grasped object and independent of the morphology of the mainipulating hand. This method is based upon a nonholonomic motion planning method for smooth system that has been extended to a certain class of discontinuous systems by recognizing a particular generic geometric structure underlying legged robotic locomotion and grasping problems, called a stratification The stratification is a decomposition of the configuration space of the system into subsets which correspond to the various combinations of fingers contacting the object. Additionally, associated with this manipulation methodology is a definition of manipulability that takes into account the fact that fingers may intermittently engage the object.