An experiment in constraining vision-based finger contact selection with gripper geometry

Research in grasping and manipulation has mainly focused on the theoretical framework of the grasp analysis and synthesis, however there are few works in the practical implementation of these approaches. We propose several methods and criteria for constraining visually-selected planar grasps to the particular kinematics of a three finger gripper, the Barrett Hand. The method relies on the features of an object provided by a vision system, and uses several criteria for classifying the possible grasps according to the configurations of the gripper that fit them. It has been implemented on the UMass Torso and the results are discussed.