Gripping Parts at Concave Vertices

ct A simple gripper with two vertical cylindrical jaws can make contact with external or internal concavities in polygonal and polyhedral parts to align and grip parts in form closure. Such grippers are inexpensive, lightweight, and their small footprint facilitates access and insertion for industrial applications. We refer to this as a v-grip. We begin by defining 2D v-grips, where a pair of frictionless point jaws makes contact with a pair of polygonal part concavities to achieve form-closure. We define a v-grip quality metric based on the maximum possible change in the part’s orientation when jaw position is relaxed infinitesimally. For a polygonal part with polygonal holes, we give an algorithm for computing and ranking 2D v-grips. We also extend the definition to jaws with non-zero radii. In 3D, v-grips are achieved with a pair of frictionless vertical cylinders. We define 3D v-grips and give a numerical algorithm for computing all 3D vgrips of a polyhedral part. If n is the num...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: K. Gopalakrishnan 0002, Kenneth Y. Goldberg
• Keywords: 2d V-grip, ICRA 2002, Non-zero Radii, Polygonal, Robotics