A heuristic approach to grasp planning for a multifingered hand-arm robot based on the structure of empty space

Abstract

This paper proposes a grasp planning for a multifingered hand-arm robot in the presence of obstacles. When the hand grasps an object, neither the hand nor the arm should collide with obstacles. However, it is very difficult to generate a collision-free grasp configuration of the hand-arm robot due to its abundant degrees of freedom of motion. To overcome this difficulty, we first decompose the hand-arm robot into the multifingered hand part and the arm part. We develop two methods of the grasp planning. In one method, a collision-free configuration of the hand part is planned first. Then, the arm configuration is planned so as to enable the hand configuration. In the other method, the collision-free configuration of the arm part is planned first and the multi-fingered hand configuration second. The best method is selected according to the space structure of the environment. Various heuristics are developed to improve the efficiency of the planning and implementation of the system. Simulation results are presented.