Planning of regrasp operations

Abstract

Robotic manipulators in contemporary work-cells are often incapable of solving even simple pick-and-place operations. More specifically, most systems require each object to be supplied in the same and pre-defined way. Introducing regrasping to the production cycle relaxes the constraints imposed on supply mechanisms. Regrasping describes the operation that must be performed whenever an object's pick-up grasp is incompatible with its put-down grasp. The paper presents a novel approach to solve the regrasp problem for robots equipped with parallel-jaw end-effecters. The proposed method first evaluates the object's possible grasps and placements. These are subsequently combined to form grasp-placement-grasp triples. A regrasp sequence leading from the pick-up to the put-down grasp is generated by searching through the resulting space of compatible grasp-placement-grasp triples. The algorithm takes kinematic and geometric constraints of both the manipulator and the objects into account. Computational concerns are addressed by subdividing the calculation into an off-line and a fast online phase.