Progressive generation of force-closure grasps for an n-section continuum manipulator

A continuum manipulator, such as a multi-section trunk/tentacle robot, is promising for deft manipulation of a wide range of objects under uncertain conditions in less-structured and cluttered environments. With whole arm grasping, it is adaptive to objects of different sizes and shapes. Previously, we introduced a method for automatically computing grasping configurations of a continuum manipulator with three constant-curvature sections was introduced based on minimum bounding circles of object cross-sections. However, using minimum bounding circles (or circumcircles if they exist) alone may not result in tight and stable grasps. In this paper, we introduce an approach for progressively generating tight grasping configurations section by section to achieve a tight and force-closure whole arm grasp. This approach directly applies to n-section continuum manipulators and generates a force-closure grasping configuration efficiently without requiring minimum bounding circles of a target object.