Steerable Spherical Wheel Based Dexterous Hand for Object Grasping and Within-Hand Manipulation

The Salisbury lab has developed a dexterous robotic hand with active fingertip surfaces for grasping and manipulation. Spherical or oblate graspers exhibit two coupled degrees of freedom, steering and rolling, allowing objects to easily be manipulated by the wheels. Reorientation and object manipulation can occur without the need to move the robot arm, to release and regrasp objects, finger gaiting, or the complex algorithms governing those processes. This has the added benefit of grasping irregularly shaped, hard, or soft objects for versatile robotic manipulation applications.

Video description: Gen 1 system in action

Video description: Gen 2 system in action

Stage of Research