A vision-based grasping system for unfamiliar planar objects

Abstract

This paper describes a vision based robotic system for grasping unfamiliar planar objects with a parallel jaw gripper. The input to the grasp synthesis system consists of projected edge data from a single camera video system calibrated to a planar working surface. A simple search procedure is used to find an acceptable grasp. Our grasp analysis metric is the required squeezing force, computed using an approximation of the rigid body equilibrium conditions. The resulting analysis conditions are formulated as a linear program and solved using the simplex method. A Zebra-ZERO robot arm with a parallel-jaw gripper is used to execute the chosen grasp. In a simple test of the system, it successfully grasped and lifted 10 of 14 test objects.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>