Extending fingertip grasping to whole body grasping

Although it is mechanically possible for a robot manipulator to grasp using non-fingertip contacts, there are few examples of this. We call non-fingertip grasping such as grasping with proximal finger phalanges or grasping with the sides of arms "whole body grasping". While robotic demonstrations are rare, humans commonly use whole body grasps to interact with the world. One of the distinctive features of whole body grasping is the kinematic coupling among potential contacts. This kinematic coupling introduces extra constraints into the grasp synthesis problem. In this paper, we extend recent grasp control techniques to whole body grasping. We show how the grasp control may be parameterized with a set of contact points on the surface of the robot manipulator that enables the grasp search to handle the extra kinematic coupling constraints and find whole body grasps.