Planning in-hand dexterous micro-manipulation using 3-D rotations decomposition

This paper aims to contribute to the improvement of dexterity in contact micro-manipulation by performing in-hand dexterous micro-manipulation planning. Previous experimental works on planar micro-manipulation showed that such an approach allows for large rotations of arbitrary shaped objects. Moving from planar to 3-D manipulation significantly increases the complexity of the manipulation planning, especially when considering the rolling of the fingers on the object during the manipulation. We propose in this paper a dexterous manipulation planning algorithm that leverages the complexity of 3-D manipulation planning by decomposing the desired 3-D rotations into three successive rotations within two different planes. Optimal paths of the manipulating fingers are thus obtained in the planar spaces and then combined to form the trajectories in the 3-D space. Besides the relevance of the approach, the simulation results show that exploiting adhesion forces improves the robustness of the manipulation and extends the manipulation capabilities, but at the expense of the computation time.