Hand Design Approach for Planar Fully Actuated Manipulators

Robotic in-hand manipulation increases the capability of robotic hands to interact with the world. The amount of manipulation that a robot is capable of is highly dependent on the design of the robot hand, and previous works have shown success in designing hands to improve performance for different types of grasping and manipulation. In this paper we present a method for designing a fully-actuated planar manipulator that optimizes for specific in-hand motions. We demonstrate that, with the Asterisk Benchmark and a light-weight IK controller, we can translate our results from simulation to the real world with minimal effort and high-fidelity. Using the simulated data (over 4,000 simulated hand-designs) we begin to analyze which features contribute to improved planar manipulation.