Planning Grasps With Suction Cups and Parallel Grippers Using Superimposed Segmentation of Object Meshes

This article develops model-based grasp planning algorithms. It focuses on industrial end-effectors like grippers and suction cups, and plans grasp configurations considering computer aided design (CAD) models of target objects. The developed algorithms can stably find many high-quality grasps, with satisfying precision and little dependency on the quality of CAD models. The undergoing core technique is superimposed segmentation, which preprocesses a mesh model by peeling it into superimposed facets. The algorithms use the facets to locate contacts and synthesize grasp poses for popular industrial end-effectors. Several tunable parameters are prepared to adapt the algorithms to meet various requirements. The experimental section studies the influence of the tunable parameters and analyzes the cost, precision, and robustness of the proposed algorithms and their planned grasps, with both simulations and real-world systems. Besides, the proposed algorithms are applicable to mesh models reconstructed from point clouds obtained by depth sensors. Some experiments and analysis are also carried out to study and demonstrate the ability.