Integrated grasp and motion planning using independent contact regions

Traditionally, grasp and arm motion planning are considered as separate tasks. This paper presents an integrated approach that only requires the initial configuration of the robotic arm and the pose of the target object to simultaneously plan a good hand pose and arm trajectory to grasp the object. The planner exploits the concept of independent contact regions to look for the best possible grasp. The goal poses for the end effector are obtained using two different methods: one that biases a sampling approach towards favorable regions using principal component analysis, and another one that considers the capabilities of the robotic arm to decide the most promising hand poses. The proposed method is evaluated using different scenarios for the humanoid robot Spacejustin.