This paper proposes a strategy for grasp and manipulation of unknown objects. In order to derive force relations of fingers, the groped shape of soft fingers is introduced. The groped shape is not equal to the real object shape, but is tightly related to the force equilibrium of fingers. By considering contact forces of the groped shape, a simple control parameters can be derived. The manipulation of an object is easily accomplished by embedding the concept of virtual centroid into the grasp control to redistribute internal forces. With these concepts, an object can be easily translated, rotated, and manipulated by relocating fingers. The proposed method is verified with experiments.

This paper presents a development of an anthropomorphic robot hand, `KITECH Hand' that has 4 full-actuated fingers. Most robot hands have small size simultaneously many joints as compared with robot manipulators. Components of actuator, gear, and sensors used for building robots are not small and are expensive, and those make it difficult to build a small sized robot hand. Differently from conventional development of robot hands, KITECH hand adopts a RC servo module that is cheap, easily obtainable, and easy to handle. The RC servo module that have been already used for several small sized humanoid can be new solution of building small sized robot hand with many joints. The feasibility of KITECH hand in object manipulation is shown through various experimental results. It is verified that the modified RC servo module is one of effective solutions in the development of a robot hand.

The gradient-projection (GP) technique is used to solve the optimal routing problem (ORP) for high-speed asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. The ORP minimizing network average packet loss probability is complicated due to packet losses at intermediate switching nodes, and the problem is nonconvex. The nonconvex ORP is transformed into a convex ORP called the reduced-ORP (R-ORP), and the GP algorithm is used to obtain a routing solution. The solution obtained for the R-ORP is shown to be a good approximation of the globally optimal solution for the ORP for realistic network operating conditions. A theoretical upper bound of the difference between the R-ORP solution and the ORP solution is derived.>