Recognition of in-hand manipulation using contact state transition for multifingered robot hand control

This paper proposes a method for recognizing in-hand manipulation of the operator by observing a contact state transition between an object and the human hand. An instrumented object with a pressure distribution sensor and a position/orientation sensor has been developed. By processing information from the sensors, the contact regions on the operator’s palm surface are detected. A contact state transition diagram is created by taking practical contact states into account. A recognition algorithm based on Dynamic Programming (DP) is proposed to recognize the type of in-hand manipulation by comparing the similarity of the contact state transition between an input sequence and template manipulation primitives. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by experiments.