On the generation of a variety of grasps

Abstract

In everyday life, people use a large diversity of hand configurations while reaching out to grasp an object. They tend to vary their hands position/orientation around the object and their fingers placement on its surface according to the object properties such as its weight, shape, friction coefficient and the task they need to accomplish. Taking into account these properties, we propose a method for generating such a variety of good grasps that can be used for the accomplishment of many different tasks. Grasp synthesis is formulated as a single constrained optimization problem, generating grasps that are feasible for the hand’s kinematics by minimizing the norm of the joint torque vector of the hand ensuring grasp stability. Given an object and a kinematic hand model, this method can easily be used to build a library of the corresponding object possible grasps. We show that the approach is adapted to different representations of the object surface and different hand kinematic models.