Kinematically Optimal Catching a Flying Ball with a Hand-Arm-System

A robotic ball-catching system built from a multipurpose 7-DOF lightweight arm (DLR-LWR-III) and a 12 DOF four-fingered hand (DLR-Hand-II) is presented. Other than in previous work a mechatronically complex dexterous hand is used for grasping the ball and the decision of where, when and how to catch the ball, while obeying joint, speed and work cell limits, is formulated as an unified nonlinear optimization problem with nonlinear constraints. Three different objective functions are implemented, leading to significantly different robot movements. The high computational demands of an online realtime optimization are met by parallel computation on distributed computing resources (a cluster with 32 CPU cores). The system achieves a catch rate of > 80% and is regularly shown as a live demo at our institute.