Papers for

prosthetics developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Robotic hand learns to assemble two parts using one hand

Assembling Two Parts in One Hand

Abstract: A hallmark of human dexterity is the cooperative use of fingers, where different fingers take on distinct yet coordinated roles to accomplish fine manipu- lation, such as capping a pen with the hand that holds it. We study this finger-level coordination through in-hand assembly: mating two rigid objects within a single dexterous hand, with no second arm and no fixture. We present a reinforcement learning formulation to solve this problem in a unified framework, which is driven by a goal relative pose between the two parts. Finger coordination is shaped by a function-based auxiliary reward and regularized toward a single human reference pose, while domain randomization and a fusion of historical proprioception and object observation confer robustness to occlusion-induced estimation noise. The same recipe solves three different assembly tasks (Bottle, Syringe, and Marker). Trained purely in simulation, the policies transfer zero-shot to hardware with a single camera, demonstrating robustness to state-estimation errors caused by oc- clusion. Our experiments also reveal that in-hand assembly places demands on hand morphology and can serve as a benchmark for modern robotic hand systems. Videos and code are available at https://ltbgbird.github.io/in-hand-assembly-page/.

Wed 9 SeptRobotics
The gist
Putting two objects together using only one hand is something humans do with ease, but it’s hard for robots. The authors taught a robot hand to hold and fit two objects together without needing help from another arm or tool. They used a kind of trial-and-error learning method, trained the robot in a computer simulation, and then successfully tested it on a real robot hand. The method works even when the robot can’t perfectly see the objects it’s holding, showing it can handle tricky situations like occlusion.
Open 2609.10137v1