Task-Based Analysis on Number of Robotic Fingers for Compliant Manipulations

This paper presents a task-based analysis on the number of independent robotic fingers required for compliant manipulations. Based on the stiffness relation between operational space and fingertip space of a multi-fingered object manipulating system, we describe a technique for modulation of the fingertip stiffness without inter-finger coupling so as to achieve the desired stiffness specified in the operational space. Thus, we provides a guide line how many fingers are basically required for successful multi-fingered compliant tasks. Consequently, this paper enables us to assign effectively the number of fingers for various compliant manipulations by robot hands.