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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

This paper describes a gripper for manipulation in natural, un-structured environments. The specific manipulation task is to plck up surface material such as pebbles, or small rocks, in a natural terrain. The application is to give autonomous sampling capabilities to an autonomous vehicle for planetary exploration. We describe the task analysis process that led to the selection of a configuration with three "soft" fingers. We carry out a complete analysis of the stability of a grasp for this gripper including an analysis of the deformation of the fingers at the points of contact. Finally. we describe the implementation of a grasp selection algorithm and present results on three-dimensional representations of objects computed from range data.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center and Field Robotics Center

Associated Project(s): Ambler

Text Reference

C. Francois, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Martial Hebert, "A Three-Finger Gripper for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '91), April, 1991, pp. 2261 - 2265.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Ikeuchi_1991_4279,
   author = "C. Francois and Katsushi Ikeuchi and Martial Hebert",
   title = "A Three-Finger Gripper for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '91)",
   pages = "2261 - 2265",
   month = "April",
   year = "1991",
}

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