Shape recognition and grasping by robotic hands with soft fingers and omnidirectional camera

The purpose of this paper is to establish a method of shape recognition and grasping of unknown objects using a robotic hand with two soft fingers and one omnidirectional camera. For shape recognition, we propose to use a simple 2D version of the visual volume intersection method which takes advantage of a special feature of the omnidiretional camera attached to the hand. For grasping we propose a simple grasp quality criterion to obtain the best grasping position for the two soft fingers based on a visual hull in a horizontal grasp plane. We conducted several experiments and the results show the validity of the proposed method.