Roller Ring

Abstract

In-hand manipulation is a crucial ability for reorienting and repositioning objects within grasps. The main challenges in this are not only the complexity of the computational models, but also the risks of grasp instability caused by active finger motions, such as rolling, sliding, breaking, and remaking contacts. This paper presents the development of the Roller Ring (RR), a modular robotic attachment with active surfaces that is wearable by both robot and human hands to manipulate without lifting a finger. By installing the angled RRs on hands, such that their spatial motions are not colinear, we derive a general differential motion model for manipulating objects. Our motion model shows that complete in-hand manipulation skill sets can be provided by as few as only 2 RRs through non-holonomic object motions, while more RRs can enable enhanced manipulation dexterity with fewer motion constraints. Through extensive experiments, we test the RRs on both a robot hand and a human hand to evaluate their manipulation capabilities. We show that the RRs can be employed to manipulate arbitrary object shapes to provide dexterous in-hand manipulation. Paper can be found here and citation here (Webb et al., 2024).

Personal Contribution

Developed the mechanical design of the Roller Ring as well as the manipulation algorithms to create a device capable of optimally manipulating objects in 3D space when affixed to both robot & human grasping systems. Code base & robot hand for the test environment came from the Yale OpenHand Project and was further modified to accommodate the Roller Ring components.

Poster