Design and Control of Roller Grasper V3 for In-Hand Manipulation

Robot in-hand manipulation is an important skill for robots to carry out sophisticated tasks that require moving the grasped object within hand. In this work, we present the Roller Grasper V3, a nonanthropomorphic robot grasper with a steerable roller on each of its four fingertips, and a manipulation architecture that enables the Roller Grasper V3 to achieve full 6-DoF manipulation of the grasped object in SE (3). The manipulation architecture consists of a high-level planner that searches for a feasible path with waypoints for the object to be manipulated, and a low-level control policy that is used to navigate the object in between the adjacent waypoints. The method was experimentally validated on the Roller Grasper V3 to manipulate multiple objects with different geometries and topologies.