Human Slip Control: Investigating the Role of Hand Acceleration Modulation in Preventing Slips

Ensuring a stable grasp during manipulative movements is crucial for robotic applications. While grip force has been the primary means of slip control, our human study revealed that trajectory modulation is also an effective slip control policy during pick-and-place tasks. Motivated by these findings, we developed and compared a slip control policy based on trajectory modulation to one based on grip force control for robotic pick-and-place tasks. Our results show that trajectory modulation significantly outperforms grip force control in certain scenarios, highlighting its potential for slip control in robotics. Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of incorporating forward models in developing effective trajectory modulation slip control systems. Overall, our study provides insight into an alternative method for slip control and suggests that humans use trajectory modulation as an alternative to grip force control for slippage prevention. This insight helps design algorithm for improving robotic manipulation tasks to prevent slippage.