Blind Grasp and Manipulation of a Rigid Object by a Pair of Robot Fingers with Soft Tips

This paper is concerned with construction of a mathematical model for a class of lumped-parameter dynamics of a pair of robot fingers with soft and deformable tips pinching a rigid object. It is then shown that, in the case of a pair of planer fingers with two and three joints and a 2-D rigid object with parallel or non-parallel flat surfaces, there exists a sensory-motor coordinated control signal constructed by using only the knowledge of finger kinematics and measurements of finger joints such that it realizes secure grasping in a dynamic sense. This shows that a pair of robot fingers can grasp a thing securely in a blind manner. The result is further extended to the case of 3-D object grasping and manipulation by a pair of soft fingers, one of which can move in 3-D space.