Automatic grasp planning for multifingered robot hands

In this paper the development of a planning environment is described which was especially tailored for grasping and manipulating with multifinger robot hands. The research has been concerned with the programming and simulation system of the Karlsruhe dextrous hand, which has been in development for two years. The work presents the result of a geometric-mechanic approach to the object-handling problem with dextrous multifinger hands by selecting grasp points and searching grasp forces to perform desired assembly tasks. The knowledge representation for the sequence planning and command execution is based on object and task restrictions combined with routines for successive optimization and a constraint propagation algorithm.