Sumit Patidar
Adrian Sieler
Oliver Brock

A large body of work for dexterous manipulation derived strategies to move the object in-hand by finely controlled fingertip contacts. This approach most often assumes static or quasi-static setups to rule out dynamic effects like inertia that are hard to model and control. Recently, Dafle et. all showed that comprehensive manipulation skills can be attained by a simple gripper-device when effects external to the end-effector are leveraged in a clever way - external contacts, gravity and inertial effects provide a rich source for robust manipulation strategies. Therefore, we assume that strategies for in-hand manipulation with highly dexterous compliant hands could also benefit from 'extrinsic dexterity' enabled by wrist movements.

The goal of this thesis is to analyze and describe the effect of wrist positioning and acceleration for in-hand manipulation with a soft anthropomorphic hand. Repositioning of the wrist changes the direction of gravity acting on the object that could be used as an additional source of actuation to change the objects configuration. In addition, inertial forces arise by the acceleration of the wrist. These forces could be guided to reconfigure the position of the object as well. Based on an initial empirical study an algorithm should be developed that automatically generates wrist motions based on knowledge of the constraints and desired object motion in-hand.