Imperial College London
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Professor Thrishantha Nanayakkara

Faculty of Engineering, Dyson School of Design Engineering

Professor in Robotics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)7902 396 681t.nanayakkara Website CV

 
 
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Location

 

RCS 1M07Dyson BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Lu:2020:10.1109/RoboSoft48309.2020.9115997,
author = {Lu, Q and Liang, H and Nanayakkara, DPT and Rojas, N},
doi = {10.1109/RoboSoft48309.2020.9115997},
pages = {52--57},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Precise in-hand manipulation of soft objects using soft fingertips with tactile sensing and active deformation},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RoboSoft48309.2020.9115997},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - While soft fingertips have shown significant development for grasping tasks, its ability to facilitate the manipulation of objects within the hand is still limited. Thanks to elasticity, soft fingertips enhance the ability to grasp soft objects. However, the in-hand manipulation of these objects has proved to be challenging, with both soft fingertips and traditional designs, as the control of coordinated fine fingertip motions and uncertainties for soft materials are intricate. This paper presents a novel technique for in-hand manipulating soft objects with precision. The approach is based on enhancing the dexterity of robot hands via soft fingertips with tactile sensing and active shape changing; such that pressurized air cavities act as soft tactile sensors to provide closed loop control of fingertip position and avoid object’s damage, and pneumatic-tuned positive-pressure deformations act as a localized soft gripper to perform additional translations and rotations. We model the deformation of the soft fingertips to predict the in-hand manipulation of soft objects and experimentally demonstrate the resulting in-hand manipulationcapabilities of a gripper of limited dexterity with an algorithm based on the proposed dual abilities. Results show that the introduced approach can ease and enhance the prehensile in-hand translation and rotation of soft objects for precision tasks across the hand workspace, without damage.
AU  - Lu,Q
AU  - Liang,H
AU  - Nanayakkara,DPT
AU  - Rojas,N
DO  - 10.1109/RoboSoft48309.2020.9115997
EP  - 57
PB  - IEEE
PY  - 2020///
SP  - 52
TI  - Precise in-hand manipulation of soft objects using soft fingertips with tactile sensing and active deformation
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RoboSoft48309.2020.9115997
UR  - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9115997
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/77600
ER  -
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