Human-inspired force compliant grasping primitives

We address the problem of grasping everyday objects that are small relative to an anthropomorphic hand, such as pens, screwdrivers, cellphones, and hammers from their natural poses on a support surface, e.g., a table top. In such conditions, state of the art grasp generation techniques fail to provide robust, achievable solutions due to either ignoring or trying to avoid contact with the support surface. In contrast, when people grasp small objects, they often make use of substantial contact with the support surface. In this paper we give results of human subjects grasping studies which show the extent and characteristics of environment contact under different task conditions. We develop a simple closed-loop hybrid grasping controller that mimics this interactive, contact-rich strategy by a position-force, pre-grasp and landing strategy for finger placement. The approach uses a compliant control of the hand during the grasp and release of objects in order to preserve safety. We conducted extensive robotic grasping experiments on a variety of small objects with similar shape and size. The results demonstrate that our approach is robust to localization uncertainties and applies to many everyday objects.