Manipulation gaits: sequences of grasp control tasks

In dexterous manipulation, an object must be reconfigured while maintaining a stable grasp. This may require that the object be re-grasped in order to avoid finger workspace limits. We present a set of closed-loop controllers designed to achieve force-related objectives such as wrench closure, and show how they may be concurrently combined. Furthermore, we show that dexterous manipulation behavior may be generated by sequencing concurrent combinations of these controllers. We show that dexterous manipulation can be viewed as a task that is accomplished in the context of a wrench closure constraint. We hypothesize this approach can generalize to any task that must be accomplished while maintaining a set of constraints.