Imperial College London
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Dr Ad Spiers

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Lecturer in Robotics and Machine Learning
 
 
 
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Contact

 

a.spiers

 
 
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Location

 

Electrical EngineeringSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Spiers:2018:10.1109/lra.2018.2856398,
author = {Spiers, AJ and Calli, B and Dollar, AM},
doi = {10.1109/lra.2018.2856398},
journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
pages = {4116--4123},
title = {Variable-friction finger surfaces to enable within-hand manipulation via gripping and sliding},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/lra.2018.2856398},
volume = {3},
year = {2018}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - The human hand is able to achieve an unparalleled diversity of manipulation actions. One contributor to this capability is the structure of the human finger pad, where soft internal tissue is surrounded by a layer of more rigid skin. This permits conforming of the finger pad around object contours for firm grasping, while also permitting low-friction sliding over object surfaces with a light touch. These varying modes of manipulation contribute to the common ability for in-hand-manipulation, where an object (such as a car key) may repositioned relative to the palm. In this letter, we present a simple mechanical analogy to the human finger pad, via a robotic finger with both high- and low-friction surfaces. The low-friction surface is suspended on elastic elements and recesses into a cavity when a sufficient normal force is applied (~1.2 to 2.5 N depending on contact location), exposing the high-friction surface. We implement one “variable friction” finger and one “constant friction” finger on a 2-DOF gripper with a simple torque controller. With this setup, we demonstrate how within-hand rolling and sliding of an object may be achieved without the need for tactile sensing, high-dexterity, dynamic finger/object modeling, or complex control methods. The addition of an actuator to the finger design allows controlled switching between variable-friction and constant-friction modes, enabling precise object translation and reorientation within a grasp, via simple motion sequences. The rolling and sliding behaviors are characterized with experimentally verified geometric models.
AU  - Spiers,AJ
AU  - Calli,B
AU  - Dollar,AM
DO  - 10.1109/lra.2018.2856398
EP  - 4123
PY  - 2018///
SN  - 2377-3766
SP  - 4116
TI  - Variable-friction finger surfaces to enable within-hand manipulation via gripping and sliding
T2  - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/lra.2018.2856398
UR  - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8411094
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/83113
VL  - 3
ER  -
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