Metamorphic Hand Based Grasp Constraint and Affordance

This paper presents the kinematics and grasp constraint and affordance of a newly designed mobile manipulator with a three-fingered metamorphic robotic hand. Structure design of the mobile manipulator, which contains a Robotino 3.0, a customised robot arm and a three-fingered metamorphic hand, is presented. Using mechanism decomposition, kinematics of the manipulator is formulated based on product-of-exponentials method and kinematics of the metamorphic hand is investigated leading to the construction of grasp constraint providing theoretical background for measuring grasp quality of the grasps predicted by the grasp-affordance model. Further, relation of the grasp-affordance model to the manipulator and hand kinematics with the associated grasp constraint are indicated linking the manipulator kinematics with the grasp-affordance model for object manipulation. The mobile manipulator proposed in this paper is to be used for toys tidying up in a child’s room with extended applications to the field of service robot in clutter clearing.