Learning to Grasp Familiar Objects Based on Experience and Objects’ Shape Affordance

Stably grasping objects for a specific task is a hot research topic in robotics due to multiple degrees of freedom of hand kinematics, various shapes of objects, and incomplete visual sensing of objects (partial point clouds). This paper proposes an effective grasp planning method by integrating the crucial grasp cues (positions and orientations of thumb fingertips and the wrist) from humans’ grasp experience. This approach has multiple advantages: greatly reducing the search space of the hand kinematics; no reconstruction or registration; being able to directly perform on the partial point cloud of objects. Meanwhile, for various shapes of objects which are partially observable in the single-view visual sensing, the presented approach learns the “thumb” grasp point employing a signature of histograms of orientations shape descriptor based on objects’ category level. This method recognizes the grasp point according to the shape affordance at each point on the object, which performs the grasp point generalization on the familiar objects. Finally, we verify the developed methods via both simulations and experiments by grasping various shapes of objects.