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A Three-Finger Gripper for Manipulation in Unstructured Environments
journal contribution
posted on 1991-01-01, 00:00 authored by C. Francois, Katsushi Ikeuchi, Martial HebertA gripper is described for manipulation in natural, unstructured environments. The specific manipulation task is to pick 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. The authors describe the task analysis process that led to the selection of a configuration with three soft fingers. They 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. The implementation of a grasp selection algorithm is described, and results on three-dimensional representations of objects computed from range data are presented