Fast Estimation of Globally Optimal Independent Contact Regions for Robust Grasping and Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, real-time algorithm for computing globally optimal independent contact regions (ICRs) to improve grasp planning, demonstrating significant speedups and robustness benefits over existing methods.

Contribution

It presents a divide and conquer algorithm based on incremental Delaunay triangulation for efficient ICR computation, enabling real-time grasp planning with bounded suboptimality.

Findings

Achieves 100X speedup over previous methods

Provides robust grasp regions guiding manipulation policies

Demonstrates effectiveness in planar contact scenarios

Abstract

This work presents a fast anytime algorithm for computing globally optimal independent contact regions (ICRs). ICRs are regions such that one contact within each region enables a valid grasp. Locations of ICRs can provide guidance for grasp and manipulation planning, learning, and policy transfer. However, ICRs for modern applications have been little explored, in part due to the expense of computing them, as they have a search space exponential in the number of contacts. We present a divide and conquer algorithm based on incremental n-dimensional Delaunay triangulation that produces results with bounded suboptimality in times sufficient for real-time planning. This paper presents the base algorithm for grasps where contacts lie within a plane. Our experiments show substantial benefits over competing grasp quality metrics and speedups of 100X and more for competing approaches to computing ICRs. We explore robustness of a policy guided by ICRs and outline a path to general 3D implementation. Code will be released on publication to facilitate further development and applications.