Grasp Control for Enhancing Dexterity of Parallel Grippers

A robust grasp controller for both slipping avoidance and controlled sliding is proposed based on force/tactile feedback only. The model-based algorithm exploits a modified LuGre friction model to consider rotational frictional sliding motions. The modification relies on the Limit Surface concept where a novel computationally efficient method is introduced to compute in real-time the minimum grasping force to balance tangential and torsional loads. The two control modalities are considered by the robot motion planning algorithm that automatically generates robot motions and gripper commands to solve complex manipulation tasks in a material handling application.