A kinematic model of finger gaits by multifingered hand as hybrid automaton

Finger gait is necessarily needed in order to relocate fingers of the robotic hand when a dextrous manipulation task cannot be accomplished only by the rolling and sliding motions of the fingers. In this paper, a novel modeling framework for the multifingered manipulation with finger gaits is proposed. Through classifying the fingers into grasping fingers and free fingers, an alternate representation of a grasp is introduced. With the consideration of both its discrete and continuous characteristics, the kinematics model of a k-fingered manipulation with finger gaits is formulated into a hybrid automaton. Finally, simulation results verify the validity of the proposed modeling framework.