Integrated motion and clasp planning with virtual linking

In this work, we address the problem of simultaneous clasp and motion planning on unknown objects with holes. Clasping an object enables a rich set of activities such as dragging, toting, pulling and hauling which can be applied to both soft and rigid objects. To this end, we define a virtual linking measure which characterizes the spacial relation between the robot hand and object. The measure utilizes a set of closed curves arising from an approximately shortest basis of the object´s first homology group. We define task spaces to perform collision-free motion planing with respect to multiple prioritized objectives using a sampling-based planing method. The approach is tested in simulation using different robot hands and various real-world objects.