Wrist-driven passive grasping: interaction-based trajectory adaption with a compliant anthropomorphic hand

The structure of the human musculo-skeletal systems shows complex passive dynamic properties, critical for adaptive grasping and motions. Through wrist and arm actuation, these passive dynamic properties can be exploited to achieve nuanced and diverse environment interactions. We have developed a passive anthropomorphic robot hand that shows complex passive dynamics. We require arm/wrist control with the ability to exploit these. Due to the soft hand structures and high degrees of freedom during passive-object interactions, bespoke generation of wrist trajectories is challenging. We propose a new approach, which takes existing wrist trajectories and adapts them to changes in the environment, through analysis and classification of the interactions. By analysing the interactions between the passive hand and object, the required wrist motions to achieve them can be mapped back to control of the hand. This allows the creation of trajectories which are parameterized by object size or task. This approach shows up to 86% improvement in grasping success rate with a passive hand for object size changes up to 50%. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.