Automatic Grasp Pose Generation for Parallel Jaw Grippers

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for the automatic offline grasp pose synthesis on known rigid objects for parallel jaw grippers. We use several criteria such as gripper stroke, surface friction, and a collision check to determine suitable 6D grasp poses on an object. In contrast to most available approaches, we neither aim for the best grasp pose nor for as many grasp poses as possible, but for a highly diverse set of grasps distributed all along the object. In order to accomplish this objective, we employ a clustering algorithm to the sampled set of grasps. This allows to simultaneously reduce the set of grasp pose candidates and maintain a high variance in terms of position and orientation between the individual grasps. We demonstrate that the grasps generated by our method can be successfully used in real-world robotic grasping applications.