Enabling Grasp Action: Generalized Evaluation of Grasp Stability via Contact Stiffness from Contact Mechanics Insight

Performing a grasp is a pivotal capability for a robotic gripper. We propose a new evaluation approach of grasping stability via constructing a model of grasping stiffness based on the theory of contact mechanics. First, the mathematical models are built to explore soft contact and the general grasp stiffness between a finger and an object. Next, the grasping stiffness matrix is constructed to reflect the normal, tangential and torsion stiffness coefficients. Finally, we design two grasping cases to verify the proposed measurement criterion of grasping stability by comparing different grasping configurations. Specifically, a standard grasping index is used and compared with the minimum eigenvalue index of the constructed grasping stiffness we built. The comparison result reveals a similar tendency between them for measuring the grasping stability and thus, validates the proposed approach.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figure

Multi-Pen Robust Robotic 3D Drawing Using Closed-Loop Planning

This paper develops a flexible and robust robotic system for autonomous drawing on 3D surfaces. The system takes 2D drawing strokes and a 3D target surface (mesh or point clouds) as input. It maps the 2D strokes onto the 3D surface and generates a robot motion to draw the mapped strokes using visual recognition, grasp pose reasoning, and motion planning. The system is flexible compared to conventional robotic drawing systems as we do not fix drawing tools to the end of a robot arm. Instead, a robot selects drawing tools using a vision system and holds drawing tools for painting using its hand. Meanwhile, with the flexibility, the system has high robustness thanks to the following crafts: First, a high-quality mapping method is developed to minimize deformation in the strokes. Second, visual detection is used to re-estimate the drawing tool's pose before executing each drawing motion. Third, force control is employed to avoid noisy visual detection and calibration, and ensure a firm touch between the pen tip and a target surface. Fourth, error detection and recovery are implemented to deal with unexpected problems. The planning and executions are performed in a closed-loop manner until the strokes are successfully drawn. We evaluate the system and analyze the necessity of the various crafts using different real-word tasks. The results show that the proposed system is flexible and robust to generate a robot motion from picking and placing the pens to successfully drawing 3D strokes on given surfaces

6DLS: Modeling Nonplanar Frictional Surface Contacts for Grasping using 6D Limit Surfaces

Robot grasping with deformable gripper jaws results in nonplanar surface contacts if the jaws deform to the nonplanar local geometry of an object. The frictional force and torque that can be transmitted through a nonplanar surface contact are both three-dimensional, resulting in a six-dimensional frictional wrench (6DFW). Applying traditional planar contact models to such contacts leads to over-conservative results as the models do not consider the nonplanar surface geometry and only compute a three-dimensional subset of the 6DFW. To address this issue, we derive the 6DFW for nonplanar surfaces by combining concepts of differential geometry and Coulomb friction. We also propose two 6D limit surface (6DLS) models, generalized from well-known three-dimensional LS (3DLS) models, which describe the friction-motion constraints for a contact. We evaluate the 6DLS models by fitting them to the 6DFW samples obtained from six parametric surfaces and 2,932 meshed contacts from finite element method simulations of 24 rigid objects. We further present an algorithm to predict multicontact grasp success by building a grasp wrench space with the 6DLS model of each contact. To evaluate the algorithm, we collected 1,035 physical grasps of ten 3D-printed objects with a KUKA robot and a deformable parallel-jaw gripper. In our experiments, the algorithm achieves 66.8% precision, a metric inversely related to false positive predictions, and 76.9% recall, a metric inversely related to false negative predictions. The 6DLS models increase recall by up to 26.1% over 3DLS models with similar precision