SYROCO
Dexterous Manipulation
The research works carried out in the area of robotic dexterous manipulation at ISIR aim to handle objects with the efficiency of humans, that is, to replicate with a robotic hand grasping and skilled in-hand movements. This should lead the robotic hand of the available platform take and use in any situation and autonomously an unknown object of everyday life with naturalness and precision. Tackled challenges to reach this overarching goal are perceptive knowledge and understanding of the environment with which the hand interacts and, planning and control of such overly complex hand-arm system.
Most recent developments are
Touch driven control
To control the physical interaction between the hand and the object, a method was proposed exploiting the compliance of tactile sensors (Thesis Z. Kappassov) to discover the underlying three dimensional structure of the contact frame between an object and a robot end-effector interacting with it. This method allows to carry out other tasks than the manipulation of objects like the tactile exploration of the environment, the manipulation by rolling of objects or the co-manipulation of objects with humans.
Controlling moment of force
Following an edge of a metal bar with variable stiffness
Tactile object recognition
To enable the robotic hand to quickly understand the geometrical nature of an object when grasped, the proprioception of the hand was exploited (Thesis A. Vasquez) to obtain with a single grasp an unique tactile signature for a given shape, independent on the position of the object in the hand and its size. A collection of random forests leads to the identification of the shape as soon as the grasp is closed. The new descriptor allows sequential training of the learning algorithm to avoid the time-consuming process of training the model from scratch when new shapes are added to the knowledge base of the robot.
Tactile signatures
Identifying a cone with a single grasp
Dexterous manipulation platform
Our platform consists of a 4 degrees-of-freedom arm, the Shadow biomorphic arm, equipped with the Shadow dexterous hand. It was designed and realized in collaboration with the project partners of the FP7 EU project HANDLE and benefits from the latest contributions from all partners.
The hand housed at ISIR is currently one of the most advanced anthropomorphic hands in terms of sensory capabilities. It is notably equipped with 6-axis sensors at the end of each of the five fingers making it possible to accurately determine the position of the contact points over the entire surface of the last phalanxes, and the amplitude and direction of the forces and torques exerted at these points.
Photo Platform
When an object is grasped and manipulated in the hand, many contacts appear between the hand and the object. Touch skin areas have therefore been integrated into the palm and the interior face of the fingers in collaboration with CEA to better approach human sensory capacities.
Touch skin areas