Best Student Paper Award Finalist
We address the problem of generating force-closed point contact grasps on complex surfaces and model it as a combinatorial optimization problem. Using a multilevel refinement metaheuristic, we maximize the quality of a grasp subject to a reachability constraint by recursively forming a hierarchy of increasingly coarser optimization problems. A grasp is initialized at the top of the hierarchy and then locally refined until convergence at each level. Our approach efficiently addresses the high-dimensional problem of synthesizing stable point contact grasps while resulting in stable grasps from arbitrary initial configurations. Compared to a sampling-based approach, our method yields grasps with higher quality. Empirical results are presented for a set of different objects. We investigate the number of levels in the hierarchy, the computational complexity, and the performance relative to a random sampling baseline approach.