PERCE's GRIPES: A robot grasp planner

PERCE's GRIPES (Purdue Engineering Research Center's Grip Evaluation System) is an offline robot grasp planner for three-fingered grippers. The planner is based on a generate and test paradigm. Candidate triples of faces (or grasp configurations) are generated using heuristics. The precise coordinates of grip points are selected for each configuration by numerical solution of optimization problems. The constraints imposed by stability considerations are built into the optimization formulations. The accessibility of each candidate grasp is checked based on swept volume computation. Other criteria are used to rank the feasible grasps. This paper describes the modular design and the implementation of PERCE's GRIPES.