Planning two-fingered grasps for pick-and-place operations on polyhedra

The authors focus on the crucial step in a pick-and-place operation, the choice of grasp. They describe an approach to choosing grasps, implemented in the task-level planning system HANDEY, which attempts to deal in a general fashion with the interaction between the choice of grasp and the choice of paths to reach the grasp. The approach is based on the systematic use of the configuration-space representation of the motion constraints on the robot. A very simple and efficient algorithm for approximating the configuration-space constraints leads to a practical method