No Arabic abstract
Customized grippers have broad applications in industrial assembly lines. Compared with general parallel grippers, the customized grippers have specifically designed fingers to increase the contact area with the workpieces and improve the grasp robustness. However, grasp planning for customized grippers is challenging due to the object variations, surface contacts and structural constraints of the grippers. In this paper, an iterative surface fitting (ISF) algorithm is proposed to plan grasps for customized grippers. ISF simultaneously searches for optimal gripper transformation and finger displacement by minimizing the surface fitting error. A guided sampling is introduced to avoid ISF getting stuck in local optima and improve the collision avoidance performance. The proposed algorithm is able to consider the structural constraints of the gripper and plan optimal grasps in real-time. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by both simulations and experiments. The experimental videos are available at: http://me.berkeley.edu/%7Eyongxiangfan/CASE2018/caseisf.html
Customized grippers have specifically designed fingers to increase the contact area with the workpieces and improve the grasp robustness. However, grasp planning for customized grippers is challenging due to the object variations, surface contacts and structural constraints of the grippers. In this paper, we propose a learning framework to plan robust grasps for customized grippers in real-time. The learning framework contains a low-level optimization-based planner to search for optimal grasps locally under object shape variations, and a high-level learning-based explorer to learn the grasp exploration based on previous grasp experience. The optimization-based planner uses an iterative surface fitting (ISF) to simultaneously search for optimal gripper transformation and finger displacement by minimizing the surface fitting error. The high-level learning-based explorer trains a region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) to propose good optimization regions, which avoids ISF getting stuck in bad local optima and improves the collision avoidance performance. The proposed learning framework with RCNN-ISF is able to consider the structural constraints of the gripper, learn grasp exploration strategy from previous experience, and plan optimal grasps in clutter environment in real-time. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by experiments.
After a grasp has been planned, if the object orientation changes, the initial grasp may but not always have to be modified to accommodate the orientation change. For example, rotation of a cylinder by any amount around its centerline does not change its geometric shape relative to the grasper. Objects that can be approximated to solids of revolution or contain other geometric symmetries are prevalent in everyday life, and this information can be employed to improve the efficiency of existing grasp planning models. This paper experimentally investigates change in human-planned grasps under varied object orientations. With 13,440 recorded human grasps, our results indicate that during pick-and-place task of ordinary objects, stable grasps can be achieved with a small subset of grasp types, and the wrist-related parameters follow normal distribution. Furthermore, we show this knowledge can allow faster convergence of grasp planning algorithm.
Grasp planning for multi-fingered hands is computationally expensive due to the joint-contact coupling, surface nonlinearities and high dimensionality, thus is generally not affordable for real-time implementations. Traditional planning methods by optimization, sampling or learning work well in planning for parallel grippers but remain challenging for multi-fingered hands. This paper proposes a strategy called finger splitting, to plan precision grasps for multi-fingered hands starting from optimal parallel grasps. The finger splitting is optimized by a dual-stage iterative optimization including a contact point optimization (CPO) and a palm pose optimization (PPO), to gradually split fingers and adjust both the contact points and the palm pose. The dual-stage optimization is able to consider both the object grasp quality and hand manipulability, address the nonlinearities and coupling, and achieve efficient convergence within one second. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The simulation video is available at: http://me.berkeley.edu/%7Eyongxiangfan/IROS2018/fingersplit.html
This work provides a framework for a workspace aware online grasp planner. This framework greatly improves the performance of standard online grasp planning algorithms by incorporating a notion of reachability into the online grasp planning process. Offline, a database of hundreds of thousands of unique end-effector poses were queried for feasability. At runtime, our grasp planner uses this database to bias the hand towards reachable end-effector configurations. The bias keeps the grasp planner in accessible regions of the planning scene so that the resulting grasps are tailored to the situation at hand. This results in a higher percentage of reachable grasps, a higher percentage of successful grasp executions, and a reduced planning time. We also present experimental results using simulated and real environments.
We present a two-level branch-and-bound (BB) algorithm to compute the optimal gripper pose that maximizes a grasp metric in a restricted search space. Our method can take the grippers kinematics feasibility into consideration to ensure that a given gripper can reach the set of grasp points without collisions or predict infeasibility with finite-time termination when no pose exists for a given set of grasp points. Our main technical contribution is a novel mixed-integer conic programming (MICP) formulation for the inverse kinematics of the gripper that uses a small number of binary variables and tightened constraints, which can be efficiently solved via a low-level BB algorithm. Our experiments show that optimal gripper poses for various target objects can be computed taking 20-180 minutes of computation on a desktop machine and the computed grasp quality, in terms of the Q1 metric, is better than those generated using sampling-based planners.