1989 Reports

Coordinating a Robot Arm and: Multi-finger Hand Using the Quaternion Representation

Roberts, Kenneth S.

An autonomous hand-arm system must be able to move its multiple fingertips to specified 3-D world locations. We present an algorithm which, given a desired position and normal for each fingertip, computes all the joint angles for the fingers and arm. Our primary method for handling this under-constrained problem is to optimize a cost function. We also give methods for generating good candidates to be optimized. We present several new techniques for using the quaternion form to optimize rotation. We give experimental results from using the algorithm to apply complicated grasps with a Utah/MIT hand-arm system.