Object Reorientation with Finger Gaiting

Coordinated object manipulation is a fundamental problem in the study of multingered robotic hands. The conventional study has been focused on deriving control algorithms for nger joints to implement a speci ed object trajectory and recently more e ort has been put into the study of automatic object trajectory planning. This paper discusses how to plan large-scale object reorientation with ngers of limited workspace. The relevant theories of contact kinematics, nonholonomic motion planning, grasp stability and nger gaiting are incorporated to develop a general framework of object reorientation with rolling contacts and nger gaiting. Our approach is illustrated by an example of reorienting a sphere with three hemi-spherical ngertips. The simulation results are presented.