Real-time grasping planning for robotic bin-picking and kitting applications

Abstract

Multi-fingered robotic hands can potentially offer a higher degree of dexterity for grasping a variety of parts than a traditional parallel gripper or a custom end of arm tool (EOAT). However, real-time grasp planning for complex robotic hands is a challenging task. In this paper, we present real-time grasping planning algorithms that utilize simple and effective dimension reduction strategies of “intersected volume” and the “finger curling planes”. Therefore, we decompose a time consuming grasp planning problem in high dimensional space into several grasp planning problems in low dimensional space that can be computed in real-time. Our algorithms have been demonstrated with simulation, physical experiments, and robotic bin-picking and kitting applications on two robotic platforms with three different robotic hands.