Grasp planning: Find the contact points

Zhixing Xue, Johann Marius Zöllner, Rüdiger Dillmann

Abstract: Automatically grasp planning for dexterous hand with a large number of degrees of freedom (DOF) is still a challenging problem. Two groups of grasp quality measurements can be considered: One associated with the position of contact points and the other associated with the hand configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to bridge the gap between the two grasp quality measurements by finding all possible contact points between a robotic hand and an object with given position and orientation. This way the contact points fulfill the second group of measurements. The first group of measurements can be used to find the best grasp, which could be executed on a real hand without unreachable or joint limit problems. We use a continuous collision detection algorithm and swept volume to efficiently gather all possible contact points through the entire configuration space of each finger. Results of finding contact points between the Schunk Anthromorph Hand (SAHand) with 13 DOFs and various objects in everyday’s environment are presented.