Computaton of force closure grasps from finite contact pont set

Abstract

An object is securely grasped when the grasp achieves force closure. The force closure property indicates that a grasp can balance any external disturbance exerted on the object. This work addresses the problem of form closure grasp synthesis in two novel aspects: the representation of the object by discrete contact points and the need to compute all force closure grasps of an object. This two aspects are very crucial for grasping in an unsupervised workspace. Several algorithms are presented to solve this problem in four specific settings which are classified by the presence of friction and the dimensions of the objects. Empirical comparisons between the proposed algorithms and existing algorithms are conducted. The comparisons focus on speed and accuracy of the algorithms. It is shown that the presented algorithms outperform existing algorithms in both aspects.