Grasp planning for parallel grippers with flexibility on its grasping surface

This paper proposes a method for planning a grasping posture for a parallel gripper attached at the tip of a robot manipulator. In order to robustly grasp several objects with various shapes, we consider a gripper having flexible sheets attached at the finger surface. We show that, by constructing a set of triangular mesh of the grasped object's polygon model, we can plan the grasping posture taking the flexibility of the grasping surface into consideration. We also show that we can define several parameters used when planning the grasping posture for each set. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical examples and experimental results.