Contact Models and Grasping Manipulation of Multifingered Robot Hands-A Review

For the past twenty years, extensive research in robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation has been established for applications from household, mobile service robot that helps old and disabled people to space applications and undersea exploration. The trend in robot hand design has been focused towards devices inspiring biological models in particular a human hand. Anthropomorphic hands with multiple fingers have been developed for stable grasping and to improve the dexterity to achieve the fine manipulation. Dexterous hands have the ability to impart arbitrary motions and forces upon its environment. Complex remote operations are possible in a very flexible way using such dexterous hands. Using multifingered hands, a much wider class of objects even very complicated geometries can be stably grasped. It may also be used to determine the product data like geometry, shape of the grasped object and the environment through dexterous motions and sensors attached to it.
There are several issues in relation to the design of an articulated hand. Researches have been done on many areas such as design, analysis and control of dexterous hand, grasp planning, grasp manipulation strategies and tactile sensing. This review paper mainly focuses on contact models and the implementation of stable grasping. Synthesis of contact model and kinematic structures are also discussed, and finally optimization of contact forces is briefly discussed.