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with its own theme. The four sections are “Background,” “Mechanical. Design,” “Control and Motion Plan- ning,” and “Applications.” As with most collections, the ...
ON THE SHELF

Mechanisms and Machine Science: Grasping in Robotic Systems Giuseppe Carbone, Ed., Springer-Verlag, London, UK, 2013, 463 pages. echanisms and Machine Science: Grasping in Robotic Systems covers a wide range of topics that comprise robotic grasping. The book is an edited collection of chapters from a variety of experts in the field of grasping. The book contains 17 chapters divided into four sections, each with its own theme. The four sections are “Background,” “Mechanical Design,” “Control and Motion Planning,” and “Applications.” As with most collections, the writing style varies among chapters; however, each chapter is readable and details useful, interesting concepts. The “Background” section is composed of four chapters, providing a historical overview of the development of robotic grasping, various means of stiffness analysis, methods for automatic generation of the equations of motion in complex and changing systems, and sensor-based methods for grasp evaluation. The section “Mechanical Design” covers a variety of designs ranging from industrial planar grippers, which account for a large portion of industrial graspers, to humanoid robotic graspers and a parallel wrist design. The chapters discuss how, on the one hand, 60–70% of the

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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2012.2236252 Date of publication: 8 March 2013

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE



grasping tasks typically performed by humans are done with only two fingers, and on the other, human hands have many more degrees of freedom to account for the wide variety of tasks they might have to perform. This section covers not only designs themselves but also what the classes of grasps are, what typical challenges are faced (such as compact designs with many degrees of freedom, complex control issues, power, and efficiency), and how to address them. The section “Control and Motion Planning” covers methods for controlling robotic hands that range from simple, classically controlled robotic one-degreeof-freedom grippers to multiactuated complex hands approaching human dexterity. It also has a chapter devoted to robotic hardware associated with control and actuation. As a robotic grasping device becomes more complex, dynamic, and high dimensional, the constraints on hardware design increase exponentially. In addition, sensor fusion, which is also discussed, is playing an increasingly significant role. There is more information and more varieties of sensors to use including vision, force, tactile, and other embedded hardware. Object tracking is covered in this section along with these other topics. Robotic vision, which is a fairly broad topic, is also covered. This section’s coverage is useful and selfcontained, opening the door to the rich literature beyond. Finally, the fourth section of the book covers applications, ranging from industrial hardware to grasp planning algorithms. An important emphasis of this section, and an important insight

March 2013

of this book in general, is that grasping is underrated for complexity and challenge. Even industrial single-axis grippers with seemingly well-defined problems have significant challenges to overcome. Chapter 14 covers the industrial robot gripper hardware employed by SCHUNK GmbH & Co., KG, while other case studies in hardware and control algorithms are considered in the ensuing chapters. These applications demonstrate a broad range of automated tasks, and presented in this chapter is a breakdown of several realworld solutions. One thing this book does particularly well is emphasize and address an important issue—measurement. It not only describes methods for grasping but also methods for evaluating how good a grasp is, whether a particular grasp will be effective, and how to empirically design or select grasping hands for a particular application. Very often in a field as young as robotics, it is important to establish methods for measuring, computing, simulating, and evaluating the problem and approaches used. This book gathers together many useful methods for the topic of grasping. Though no single reference will be complete, Mechanisms and Machine Science: Grasping in Robotic Systems provides a useful overview as well as many references that will help the reader effectively “grasp” the concepts. —Reviewed by Alex Simpkins, Jr., Ph.D. Seattle, Washington