Searching a valid hand configuration to perform a given grasp ⋆

This paper presents a methodology to find a configuration of an anthropomorphic hand that satisfies some desire contact contact constraints on an object. The proposed approach has an on-line procedure, which iteratively looks for the final hand configuration starting from an initial one using the hand Jacobian, and an off-line procedure, which determines a set of initial configurations for the on-line procedure, using for this purpose heuristics obtained from the observation of the hand grasping an object and a statistical analysis of test trials. The off-line work is intended to simplify and speed up the on-line work that must deal with a thirty degrees of freedom system including the existence of close kinematics chains. The paper includes details of the approach implementation as well as some examples to illustrate the procedure performance.