Object grasping by combining caging and force closure

Abstract

The current research trends of object grasping can be summarized as caging grasping and force closure grasping. The motivation of this paper is to combine the advantage of caging grasping and force closure grasping to enable under-actuated grippers like the Lacquey gripper and the parallel grippers like the PR2 gripper to quickly grasp the flat unknown objects. Inspired by the idea that caging grasping generates finger points along the object's boundary and considering the geometry property of the grippers, we propose to allocate a discrete set of finger candidates along the object's boundary. Any two of the finger candidates can form a grasp candidate, which is analyzed by using force closure to choose the best grasp candidate as the final grasp execution. The grasp quality during the manipulation of the object is guaranteed by considering the gravity of the object. Simulations and experiments on an Universal arm UR5 and an under-actuated Lacquey Fetch gripper are used to examine the performance of this algorithm, and successful results are obtained.