Extended independent contact regions for grasping applications

Independent contact regions have been proposed as a way to overcome possible errors in finger positioning for grasping an object. Efficient implementations for their computation have been developed, that even allow their usage in real-time telemanipulation applications. However, the main problems in the computation of contact regions are that they strongly depend on the initial grasp used as an starting point, and that for a given initial grasp there is not a unique set of contact regions. This paper analyzes the optimality of current approaches for ICR computation in 2D, where the optimal regions are still easily computable, and proposes an algorithm to obtain contact regions closer to the optimal ones. The approach is implemented and analyzed for 2D and 3D objects with any number of contact points.