A two-fingered robot gripper with large object reorientation range

It is very challenging for a robotic gripper to achieve large reorientations with grasped objects without accidental object ejection. This paper presents a simple gripper that can repeatedly achieve large reorientations over π/2 rad through the kinematics of the hand-object system alone, without the use of high fidelity contact sensors, complex control of active finger surfaces, or highly actuated fingers. This gripper is the result of two kinematic parameter search optimizations connected in cascade. Besides the large range of reorientation attained, the obtained gripper also corresponds to a novel topology since ternary joints in the palm are presented. The in-hand planar reorientation capabilities of the proposed gripper are experimentally tested with success.