A Survey of Methods and Strategies for High-Precision Robotic Grasping and Assembly Tasks—Some New Trends

Grasping and assembly are essential tasks in high-precision robotic manipulation for industrial manufacturing as well as for home service applications. Many efforts have been devoted to this area in an attempt to meet the increasing precision requirement of the task. However, it remains a problematic objective to fulfill high precision, high reliability, high speed, and high flexibility all at once during one robotic manipulation task. To find answers to the above-mentioned problem, this article tries to categorize, review, and compare the recent works focusing on robotic grasping and assembly tasks to reveal some potential trends in this research area. The approaches will be divided into five groups based on the difference in the utilization of sensing or constraints. For each part, robotic grasping and assembly will be treated as practical cases to illustrate the concrete work in that area. This article could give the readers some knowledge on the current developments in robotic manipulation, and provide new thoughts on future direction in this area—inspiring new designs, structures, and systems to meet new requirements in applications in industrial manufacturing and home service.