1. Grasping and Fixturing with Customized Effectors
Jun Seo, Mark Yim, and Vijay Kumar
GRASP Laboratory and Dept. of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
University of Pennsylvania 1

2. PPR Review @ MIT on Dec 9th, 2013
How to grasp/cage an object with the three types of effectors?
cylindrical effector
object
planar effector
spherical effector

3. PPR Review @ MIT on Dec 9th, 2013
Two effectors at
a vertex-vertex antipodal pair
a vertex-face antipodal pair
an edge-edge antipodal pair
The collection of three immobilizing grasps that is complete.
Whole-Arm Grasping by a modular manipulator
4×2 arm
3×3 arm
2×4 arm
End-effectors
All contacts are assumed to be frictionless, rigid, and unilateral.

4. Major Departure: More Generalized Theory
To a wider range of effectors:
effectors with a surface represented as an energy-like function
cylindrical effector
planar effector
spherical effector
From the three particular effectors
analytical method for synthesizing grasps
To a wider range of effectors:
empirical method for synthesizing cages
ring effector
Apply off-the-shelf motion planning algorithms
to test if the object is caged
…and cages

5. Major Departure: More Complete Implementation
Autonomous planning/control by ROS/MoveIt!
(software/tutorial available at
Autonomous perception with a monocular camera
(collaborating with Prof. Daniilidis’s group at Penn)