Robust grasping under object pose uncertainty

Abstract

This paper presents a decision-theoretic approach to problems that require accurate placement of a robot relative to an object of known shape, such as grasping for assembly or tool use. The decision process is applied to a robot hand with tactile sensors, to localize the object on a table and ultimately achieve a target placement by selecting among a parameterized set of grasping and information-gathering trajectories. The process is demonstrated in simulation and on a real robot. This work has been previously presented in Hsiao et al. (Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2008; Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), 2010) and Hsiao (Relatively robust grasping, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009).