Fast Grasp Planning Using Cord Geometry

In this paper, we propose a novel idea to address the problem of fast computation of stable force-closure grasp configurations for a multifingered hand and a 3-D rigid object represented as a polygonal soup model. The proposed method performs a low-level shape exploration by wrapping multiple cords around the object in order to quickly isolate promising grasping regions. Around these regions, we compute grasp configurations by applying a variant of the close-until-contact procedure to find the contact points. The finger kinematics and the contact information are then used to filter out unstable grasps. Through many simulated examples with three different anthropomorphic hands, we demonstrate that, compared with previous grasp planners such as the generic grasp planner in Simox, the proposed grasp planner can synthesize grasps that are more natural-looking for humans (as measured by the grasp quality measure skewness) for objects with complex geometries in a short amount of time. Unlike many other planners, this is achieved without costly model preprocessing such as segmentation by parts and medial axis extraction.