Automated Design of Robotic Hands for In-Hand Manipulation Tasks

Grasp planning and motion synthesis for dexterous manipulation tasks are traditionally done given a pre-existing kinematic model for the robotic hand. In this paper, we introduce a framework for automatically designing hand topologies best suited for manipulation tasks given high-level objectives as input. Our pipeline is capable of building custom hand designs around specific manipulation tasks based on high-level user input. Our framework comprises of a sequence of trajectory optimizations chained together to translate a sequence of objective poses into an optimized hand mechanism along with a physically feasible motion plan involving both the constructed hand and the object. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by synthesizing a series of hand designs optimized to perform specified in-hand manipulation tasks of varying difficulty. We extend our original pipeline 32 to accommodate the construction of hands suitable for multiple distinct manipulation tasks as well as provide an in depth discussion of the effects of each non-trivial optimization term.