A System for General In-Hand Object Re-Orientation

A common maneuver in many tasks of daily living is to pick an object, reorient it in hand and then either place it or use it as a tool. Consider three simplified variants of this maneuver shown in Figure 1. The task in the top row requires an upward-facing multi-finger hand to manipulate an arbitrary object in a random orientation to a goal configuration shown in the rightmost column. The next two rows show tasks where the hand is facing downward and is required to reorient the object either using the table as a support or without the aid of any support surface respectively. The last task is the hardest because the object is in an intrinsically unstable configuration owing to the downward gravitational force and lack of support from the palm.