FINDING ANTIPODAL POINT GRASPS ON IRREGULARLY SHAPED OBJECTS

Two-finger antipodal point grasping of arbitrarily shaped smooth 2-D and 3-D objects is considered. An object function is introduced that maps a finger contact space to the object surface. Conditions are developed to identify the feasible grasping region, F, in the finger contact space. A ''grasping energy function,'' E, is introduced that which is proportional to the distance between two grasping points. The antipodal points correspond to critical points of E in F. Optimization and/or continuation techniques are used to find these critical points. In particular, global optimization techniques are applied to find the ''maximal'' or ''minimal'' grasp. Further, modeling techniques are introduced for representing 2-D and 3-D objects using B-spline curves and spherical product surfaces.