Graspability: A description of work surfaces for planning of robot manipulation sequences

For complex manipulation with multiple objects a service robot needs information about the structure of its environment including how and where it can manipulate in it. For this purpose, we introduce the Graspability. It is a measure describing the quality of a pose in Cartesian space for grasping or placing an object. The graspability considers kinematic reachability for a grasping robot and available grasps for the object. It is based on the assumption, that in manipulation tasks, objects tend to be located on a planar surfaces and have to be graspable from that plane, based on that assumption, we develop a discrete map of the environment which enables the use of the graspability in an autonomous planning system for complex manipulation tasks with multiple objects. Generated manipulation actions are evaluated on a real robot.