Dexterous Cable Manipulation: Taxonomy, Multi-Fingered Hand Design, and Long-Horizon Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive taxonomy for dexterous cable manipulation, designs a novel five-fingered robotic hand, and creates a demonstration pipeline, advancing the field of robotic cable manipulation beyond existing two-fingered approaches.

Contribution

It defines a detailed taxonomy of cable manipulation tasks, designs a new multi-fingered hand with enhanced dexterity, and develops a demonstration pipeline for complex cable tasks.

Findings

Taxonomy reveals thumb-index coordination is key.

Designed a 25-DoF five-fingered hand for manipulation.

Created a demonstration pipeline for non-anthropomorphic hand.

Abstract

Existing research that addressed cable manipulation relied on two-fingered grippers, which make it difficult to perform similar cable manipulation tasks that humans perform. However, unlike dexterous manipulation of rigid objects, the development of dexterous cable manipulation skills in robotics remains underexplored due to the unique challenges posed by a cable's deformability and inherent uncertainty. In addition, using a dexterous hand introduces specific difficulties in tasks, such as cable grasping, pulling, and in-hand bending, for which no dedicated task definitions, benchmarks, or evaluation metrics exist. Furthermore, we observed that most existing dexterous hands are designed with structures identical to humans', typically featuring only one thumb, which often limits their effectiveness during dexterous cable manipulation. Lastly, existing non-task-specific methods did not have enough generalization ability to solve these cable manipulation tasks or are unsuitable due to the designed hardware. We have three contributions in real-world dexterous cable manipulation in the following steps: (1) We first defined and organized a set of dexterous cable manipulation tasks into a comprehensive taxonomy, covering most short-horizon action primitives and long-horizon tasks for one-handed cable manipulation. This taxonomy revealed that coordination between the thumb and the index finger is critical for cable manipulation, which decomposes long-horizon tasks into simpler primitives. (2) We designed a novel five-fingered hand with 25 degrees of freedom (DoF), featuring two symmetric thumb-index configurations and a rotatable joint on each fingertip, which enables dexterous cable manipulation. (3) We developed a demonstration collection pipeline for this non-anthropomorphic hand, which is difficult to operate by previous motion capture methods.