A novel object slicing based grasp planner for 3D object grasping using underactuated robot gripper

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel object slicing method for grasp planning with underactuated robotic grippers, enabling effective grasping of complex objects directly from point cloud data, considering kinematic constraints.

Contribution

It presents a new object slicing based grasp planner that efficiently finds feasible grasps for underactuated grippers on complex objects without shape simplification.

Findings

Successfully tested on 24 household objects and toys.

Handles complex shapes and sizes without geometric simplification.

Compatible with point cloud data from depth sensors.

Abstract

Robotic grasping of arbitrary objects even in completely known environments still remains a challenging problem. Most previously developed algorithms had focused on fingertip grasp, failing to solve the problem even for fully actuated hands/grippers during adaptive/wrapping type of grasps, where each finger makes contact with object at several points. Kinematic closed form solutions are not possible for such an articulated finger which simultaneously reaches several given goal points. This paper, presents a framework for computing best grasp for an underactuated robotic gripper, based on a novel object slicing method. The proposed method quickly find contacts using an object slicing technique and use grasp quality measure to find the best grasp from a pool of grasps. To validate the proposed method, implementation has been done on twenty-four household objects and toys using a two finger underactuated robot gripper. Unlike the many other existing approaches, the proposed approach has several advantages: it can handle objects with complex shapes and sizes; it does not require simplifying the objects into primitive geometric shape; Most importantly, it can be applied on point clouds taken using depth sensor; it takes into account gripper kinematic constraints and generates feasible grasps for both adaptive/enveloping and fingertip types of grasps.