VARO-Fi: A Variable Orientable Gripper to Obtain In-Hand Manipulation

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel gripper or end-effector named VARO-fi (VARiable Orientable fingers with translation), with the aim of obtaining human like prehensile manoeuvre such as, in-hand manipulation. The 4 fingered VARO-fi consists of 9 degrees of freedom and it can perform several in-hand manipulation tasks which have been described in this paper. Moreover, the gripper is a simplification of previously proposed gripper platform called Dexclar. The derivation of VARO-fi has been presented and its capabilities have been demonstrated by experiments. Although a generic convex payload is considered as a primitive in the design of VARO-fi however, it is capable to address manipulation for other regular shaped payloads, which has been proven by experiments. A comparison is also illustrated in order to underline the strength of the novel gripper with respect to the state of the art.