Hierarchical Fingertip Space for multi-fingered precision grasping

Dexterous in-hand manipulation of objects benefits from the ability of a robot system to generate precision grasps. In this paper, we propose a concept of Fingertip Space and its use for precision grasp synthesis. Fingertip Space is a representation that takes into account both the local geometry of object surface as well as the fingertip geometry. As such, it is directly applicable to the object point cloud data and it establishes a basis for the grasp search space. We propose a model for a hierarchical encoding of the Fingertip Space that enables multilevel refinement for efficient grasp synthesis. The proposed method works at the grasp contact level while not neglecting object shape nor hand kinematics. Experimental evaluation is performed for the Barrett hand considering also noisy and incomplete point cloud data.