Analysis of Multifingered Hands

Abstract

This paper discusses three fundamental problems relating to grasping and manipulating objects within an articulated, multifingered hand: determining how hard to squeeze an ob ject in order to ensure a secure grasp, determining the finger- joint motions required to produce a desired motion of the object, and determining the workspace of the hand. Squeezing the object, or the application of internal grasp forces, is reduced to a linear programming problem which considers friction and joint torque limit constraints. The relationship between the finger-joint motions and the motion of the object, for the case of pure rolling between the finger tips and the object, is formulated as a set of differential equa tions. The total workspace for a hand is determinedfor spe cial cases of planar and spatial hands.