Characterization of grasp quality measures for evaluating robotic hands prehension

Many analytical metrics have been proposed to evaluate the quality of a grasp based on different criteria and principles. To use most of them in practical real applications, some operational parameters need to be determined: maximum and minimum values, normalization ratios, quality thresholds, robustness in front of position errors and, more importantly, relations between alternative metrics. This paper proposes a methodology to study and characterize the operational parameters that allow the use of several metrics in practical applications, and comparing them. The proposed approach uses exhaustive simulation testing to obtains statically significant results regarding the measurements of several quality metrics. This allows an informed setting of the practical operational values for each metric. Results are provided for a Barrett hand grasping a varied set of objects.