Dynamic control of soft-finger hands for pivoting an object in contact with the environment

We propose a dynamic control method of soft-finger hands for pivoting an object in contact with the environment. This pivoting operation is often observed when a human moves a large or heavy object such as furniture. Different from the conventional manipulation of the object by only fingers, the characteristic of the pivoting operation is that we can use the reaction force from the environment. By using this reaction force, we can expect the magnitude of the forces applied to the object by the fingers to be smaller than the conventional manipulation of the object by only fingers. Taking this characteristic of the reaction force into consideration, we propose a dynamic control method for pivoting. To verify our approach, the simulation result is also presented