Synthesizing Diverse and Physically Stable Grasps with Arbitrary Hand Structures using Differentiable Force Closure Estimator
Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) Special Issue: Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenges and Progress, 2021
Authors: Tengyu Liu, Zeyu Liu, Ziyuan Jiao, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu
Existing grasp synthesis methods are either analytical or data-driven. The former one is oftentimes limited to specific application scope. The latter one depends heavily on demonstrations, thus suffers from generalization issues; \eg, models trained with human grasp data would be difficult to transfer to 3-finger grippers. To tackle these deficiencies, we formulate a fast and differentiable force closure estimation method, capable of producing diverse and physically stable grasps with arbitrary hand structures, without any training data. Although force closure has commonly served as a measure of grasp quality, it has not been widely adopted as an optimization objective for grasp synthesis primarily due to its high computational complexity; in comparison, the proposed differentiable method can test a force closure within milliseconds. In experiments, we validate the proposed method’s efficacy in 6 different settings.