Contact point clustering approach for 5-fingered regrasp planning

We propose a heuristic approach for a regrasp planning problem. The input with a large number of discrete contact points is considered. In this setting, traditional methods of complete solution is not available. Based on wrench space information of the input, our proposed algorithm clusters the input into groups and chooses a representative contact point from each group. A global graph structure for regrasp planning is then constructed using all force closure grasps that can be formed only by representative contact points. Also described are approaches for finding a regrasping sequence from an arbitrary grasp to a grasp in the global structure. Once such regrasping sequences are found for linking the input initial and target grasps to the global graph structure, the regrasp planning problem can be solved as a graph search. The results from preliminary experiments indicate that our method can solve many problem instances efficiently.