Functional power grasps transferred through warping and replanning

Abstract

This paper presents a method to transfer functional grasps among objects of the same category through contact warping and local replanning. The method transfers implicit knowledge that enables an action on a class of objects for which no explicit grasp or task information has been given in advance. Contact points on the source object are warped based on global and local shape similarities to the target object. These warped contacts are then used to define a hand posture that reaches close to them, while at the same time provides the desired functionality on the object. The approach is tested on different sets of objects with a success rate of 87.5%, and large benefits are shown when compared to a naive technique that only transfers a suitable hand pose to the novel object.