Designing Grasping Tools for Robotic Assembly Based on Shape Analysis of Parts

This paper aims to provide a method for automatically designing a set of grasping tools performing a sequence of robotic assembly tasks. First, the convex shape decomposition is applied to extract the grasped part of an object. From the shape information of the part, we determine the number of fingers of the grasping tool as well as the stroke and dimension of each finger. Next, the detailed shape of finger surface such as the slant angle and the curvature radius is determined by applying the plane clustering to the surface of the grasped part. We consider reducing the number of grasping tools used in a whole sequence of assembly by checking if a same grasping tool can be commonly used between two individual assembly tasks. Finally, the proposed method was verified through a series of robotic assembly experiments.