Planning grasp strategies That Exploit Environmental Constraints

There is strong evidence that robustness in human and robotic grasping can be achieved through the deliberate exploitation of contact with the environment. In contrast to this, traditional grasp planners generally disregard the opportunity to interact with the environment during grasping. In this paper, we propose a novel view of grasp planning that centers on the exploitation of environmental contact. In this view, grasps are sequences of constraint exploitations, i.e. consecutive motions constrained by features in the environment, ending in a grasp. To be able to generate such grasp plans, it becomes necessary to consider planning, perception, and control as tightly integrated components. As a result, each of these components can be simplified while still yielding reliable grasping performance. We propose a first implementation of a grasp planner based on this view and demonstrate in real-world experiments the robustness and versatility of the resulting grasp plans.