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Foundations of Robotics
Seminar, November 3, 2009
Time
and Place | Seminar Abstract
Generality and Simple Hands
Matt Mason
RI
CMU
NSH 1507
Talk 4:30 pm
How do generality and simplicity trade off in the design of robot hands? Complex anthropomorphic hands seem to offer generality, but would it also be possible to produce a general-purpose simple hand? This talk explores the tension between simplicity in hand design and generality in hand function. It raises arguments both for and against simple hands; it considers several familiar examples; and it proposes a concept for a simple hand design with associated strategies for grasping and object localization. The central idea is to use knowledge of stable grasp poses as a cue for object localization. This leads to some novel design criteria, such as a desire to have only a few stable grasp poses. We explore some of the design implications for a bin- picking task, and then examine some experimental results to see how this approach might be applied in an assistive object retrieval task. The work is a collaboration with Siddhartha Srinivasa, Alberto Rodriguez, and Andres Vazquez.
The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.