Effect of Virtual Spring-Damper in Grasping and Object Manipulation of a Robotic Hand-Arm System

A simple control method for realizing dynamic object manipulation by a hand-arm system with redundant DOFs is proposed, which need not introduce any performance indices to solve inverse kinematics uniquely and Jacobian pseudoinverse. The proposed control signal is composed of superposition of three control signals for damping shaping, grasping, and object manipulation. It is shown through computer simulations that the proposed control scheme makes satisfactory performances in robotic grasping and object manipulation without employment of any solutions of complex equations, such as inverse kinematics, and the use of any information of sensing such as force and tactile. It is also shown that the damping shaping based on virtual spring-damper hypothesis, which had been proposed for reaching movements of a redundant robot arm, is effective in the damping shaping of a hand-arm system