Automatic planning of a grasp for a `pick and place´ action

A system that automatically plans grasp operations is described. This work has been undertaken in the framework of a project for automatic planning of pick-and-place tasks. The originality of the system comes from the consideration of the strong interdependencies existing between the different planning modules that are involved. It deals explicitly with the interactions between transfer motions, approach motions, the propagation of position uncertainty constraints as well as constraints induced by the local environment of the next step in a pick-and-place context. The approach motion step is based on a motion planner that builds an exact representation of a three-dimensional (x, y, θ) free configuration space