Vegetable Peeling: A Case Study in Constrained Dexterous Manipulation

Having robots perform food preparation tasks has been of great interest in robotics. Imagine the scenario of making mashed potatoes, where a critical step is to peel potatoes. Humans peel potatoes by grasping the potato in one hand and using the second hand to actuate a peeler to remove the potato's skin. After a part of the potato is peeled, it is rotated while being held in the hand (i.e., in-hand manipulation) and peeled again. The sequence of rotating and peeling continues until all of the potato's skin is removed. In this work, we present a robotic system that can re-orient different vegetables using an Allegro hand in a way that their skin can be peeled using another manipulator. Our setup is shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. In-hand rotation of vegetables is an instance of dexterous manipulation problem [1], a family of tasks that involves continuously controlling the force on an object while it is moving with respect to the fingertips [2, 3].