ContactGrasp: Functional Multi-finger Grasp Synthesis from Contact (1904.03754v3)

Abstract: Grasping and manipulating objects is an important human skill. Since most objects are designed to be manipulated by human hands, anthropomorphic hands can enable richer human-robot interaction. Desirable grasps are not only stable, but also functional: they enable post-grasp actions with the object. However, functional grasp synthesis for high degree-of-freedom anthropomorphic hands from object shape alone is challenging because of the large optimization space. We present ContactGrasp, a framework for functional grasp synthesis from object shape and contact on the object surface. Contact can be manually specified or obtained through demonstrations. Our contact representation is object-centric and allows functional grasp synthesis even for hand models different than the one used for demonstration. Using a dataset of contact demonstrations from humans grasping diverse household objects, we synthesize functional grasps for three hand models and two functional intents. The project webpage is https://contactdb.cc.gatech.edu/contactgrasp.html.