Many researchers have studied about manipulation of an object by robot manipulator. All of them, however, focused on manipulation with rigid grasping. They consider a manipulation of an object with assumptions that grasp constructs “form closure” and “force closure.” In manipulation by human hand, however, we often move an object by pushing, snapping, bringing down etc, taking advantage of environment surrounding it. We can achieve very dexterous manipulation without grasping of an object.

We, manipulation group of Arai-Ota laboratory, aim to adapt several human like dexterous manipulation of an object to the robot manipulation. With these manipulation methods, the load can be reduced, and the mechanism of manipulator becomes simple as compared with traditional pick-and-place method. Moreover, it brings a new operation, which cannot be accomplished only by pick-and-place.

Concretely speaking, we have studied about

1. Graspless Manipulation: pushing, tumbling that use the environment around to support the operation. (Fig. 1)
2. Releasing Manipulation: snapping an object on a flat table to move it to a desired position. (Fig. 2)

1) Y. Aiyama and T. Arai: “Dexterous Manipulation Methodology”, Proc. 1996 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots and Systems, pp 905?910,1996.

Fig. 1 Graspless Manipulation

Fig. 2 Releasing Manipulation