Sensitive Active Surfaces on the Velvet II Dexterous Gripper

The Velvet Fingers [1] is a dexterous under-actuated gripper for unstructured industrial environments. It offers enhanced manipulability by means of Active Surfaces (AS) on its fingers, i. e., surfaces able to emulate different levels of friction and to apply tangential thrusts to the contacted object. The usefulness of the AS (implemented by controlled conveyor belts) is discussed in [2]. Although their benefits are substantial, their main limitations are the lack of force feedback and missing information of the contact point location, as well as limitations on the fictitious friction range.