Kinematics and control of multifingered hands with rolling contact

The kinematics of rolling contact are derived for two surfaces of arbitrary shape rolling on each other. The kinematic equations are applied to a multifingered hand manipulating some object of arbitrary shape in three dimensions, and a scheme is presented for the control of such a hand which is a generalization of the computed torque method of control of robot manipulators. In implementing the control, it is required that all applied forces lie within the friction cone of the object so that sliding does not occur. The theory has been validated by dynamic graphical simulations of the resulting closed-loop system for several examples.<
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