Task-Oriented Tool Manipulation With Robotic Dexterous Hands: A Knowledge Graph Approach From Fingers to Functionality

A primary challenge in robotic tool use is achieving precise manipulation with dexterous robotic hands to mimic human actions. It requires understanding human tool use and allocating specific functions to each robotic finger for fine control. Existing work has primarily focused on the overall grasping capabilities of robotic hands, often neglecting the functional allocation among individual fingers during object interaction. In response to this, we introduce a semantic knowledge-driven approach to distribute functions among fingers for tool manipulation. Central to this approach is the finger-to-function (F2F) knowledge graph, which captures human expertise in tool use and establishes relationships between tool attributes, tasks, and manipulation elements, including functional fingers, components, required force, and gestures. We also develop a manipulation element-oriented prediction algorithm using knowledge graph semantic embedding, enhancing the prediction of manipulation elements’ speed and accuracy. Additionally, we propose the functionality-integrated adaptive force feedback manipulation (FAFM) module, which integrates manipulation elements with adaptive force feedback to achieve precise finger-level control. Our framework does not rely on extensive annotated data for supervision but utilizes semantic constraints from F2F to guide tool manipulation. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance and generalizability in real-world scenarios, achieving an 8% higher success rate in grasping and manipulation of representative tool instances compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/yangfan293/F2F.