Best Robotic Manipulation Paper Award Finalist
In this work, we present an algorithm that simultaneously searches for a high-quality fingertip grasp and a collision-free path for a robot hand-arm system to achieve it. The algorithm combines a bidirectional sampling-based motion planning approach with a hierarchical contact optimization process. Instead of tackling these problems in a decoupled manner, the grasp optimization is guided by the proximity to collision-free configurations explored by the motion planner. We implemented the algorithm for a 13-DoF manipulator and showed that it is capable of efficiently planning reachable high-quality grasps in cluttered environments. Furthermore, we demonstrated that our algorithm outperforms a decoupled integration in terms of planning runtime.