Towards Relating Grasping Posture and Fingers-Object Curvature in the Vicinity of a Contact Location

The paper builds up on a recently developed planar control-oriented finger kinematic model for natural grasping, based on thumb-long finger(s) anthropometric data. In the model, the posture is determined by the radius R of a virtual cylinder encompassed by the fingers. The results from the model are combined with circle configuration techniques based on the Pedoe maps, to explore the relation between the fingertip-object curvature within the contact and the configuration parameter R for precision grasping. Within the proposed contact geometry set up the fingertip and object curvatures are represented by circles with different radii. The type of interaction is described by defining a configuration matrix. Six fingertip grasping configurations are considered, each of which is constructed from five available circles: two for the fingertips, one virtual circle, and two at the fingertip-object contact points. The results from the case study show that it is possible to calculate the configuration parameter R based on the choice of any four circles. The preliminary results could further benefit the field of postural synergies and object manipulation, and open the door to the definition of novel kinematic tasks and future combined design-control strategies.

[1]  Jong-Seob Won,et al.  Control-Oriented Finger Kinematic Model: Geometry-Based Approach , 2019 .

[2]  Gaston Darboux.  Sur les relations entre les groupes de points, de cercles et de sphères dans le plan et dans l'espace , 1872 .

[3]  Shramana Ghosh,et al.  Simultaneous Geometric Design of Mechanical Fingers for Coordinated Movement , 2015 .

[4]  Byoung-Ho Kim.  Analysis of Coordinated Motions of Humanoid Robot Fingers Using Interphalangeal Joint Coordination , 2014 .

[5]  John Kenneth Salisbury,et al.  Simulating human fingers: a soft finger proxy model and algorithm , 2004, 12th International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, 2004. HAPTICS '04. Proceedings..

[6]  J. F. Soechting,et al.  Postural Hand Synergies for Tool Use , 1998, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[7]  Nina Robson,et al.  Geometric Design of Spherical Serial Chains With Curvature Constraints in the Environment , 2011 .

[8]  J. Michael McCarthy,et al.  Kinematic Synthesis With Contact Direction and Curvature Constraints on the Workpiece , 2007 .

[9]  Mark R. Cutkosky,et al.  SpinyHand: Contact Load Sharing for a Human-Scale Climbing Robot , 2019, Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics.

[10]  D. Pedoe,et al.  Geometry, a comprehensive course , 1988 .

[11]  Paolo Bonato,et al.  Patient specific ankle-foot orthoses using rapid prototyping , 2011, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

[12]  J. Burdick,et al.  A configuration space analysis of bodies in contact. I: 1st order mobility , 1995 .

[13]  Antonio Bicchi,et al.  Modelling natural and artificial hands with synergies , 2011, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[14]  M. Ferrarin,et al.  Multi-finger coordination in healthy subjects and stroke patients: a mathematical modelling approach , 2011, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

[15]  Xudong Zhang,et al.  Quantitative analysis of finger motion coordination in hand manipulative and gestic acts. , 2004, Human movement science.

[16]  D. Pedoe,et al.  Circles, a mathematical view , 1957 .

[17]  D. Pedoe,et al.  On a Theorem in Geometry , 1967 .

[18]  Nina Robson,et al.  Geometric Design With Multiple Realizable Motion Tasks in the Vicinity of a Planar Mechanism–Environment Contact , 2018 .

[19]  Jacob D. Furst,et al.  An improved articulated model of the human hand , 2001, The Visual Computer.

[20]  Np Robson,et al.  Second Order Task Specifications in the Geometric Design of Spatial Mechanical Linkages , 2010 .

[21]  Helge J. Ritter,et al.  Visual recognition of continuous hand postures , 2002, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks.

[22]  Jerzy Kocik.  A theorem on circle configurations , 2007, 0706.0372.

[23]  Xuguang Wang,et al.  A 25 degrees of freedom hand geometrical model for better hand attitude simulation , 2004 .

[24]  Jingzhou James Yang,et al.  Virtual human hand: model and kinematics , 2014, Computer methods in biomechanics and biomedical engineering.