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GRASP Seminar Series: Fall 2008
October 31st, 11:00 a.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)
Peter Allen
Columbia University
"Graspit!: A Visualization and Simulation Engine for Grasping Research"
Abstract: Robotic hands are still a long way from matching the grasping and
manipulation capability of their human counterparts. One way to push
the research further along is to use computer modeling and simulation
to learn more about human and robotic grasping. We have created a
publicly available simulator called Graspit! to serve this purpose. It
can accommodate a wide variety of hand designs, and it can evaluate
grasps formed by these hands, as well as perform full dynamic
simulation of the grasping process. In this talk, we will describe a
wide range of research on intelligent grasping that we have performed
using the Graspit! simulator.
The first project is to use low-dimensional grasping subspaces to plan
stable grasps. This reduced dimensionality framework can serve as an
interface between the human and automated components of a prosthetic
system. We have built an on-line grasp planner using GraspIt! that
allows a human user to perform dexterous grasping tasks using an
artificial hand, even if the user has no direct control over finger
posture. This method combines human and automated control for
dexterous grasping; we will discuss the interplay between the two and
present interesting new directions for research in interactive
grasping. The second project is to pre-compute stable grasps using
GraspIt! on a wide variety of object models to create an indexed
database of models that can be efficiently searched to find stable
grasps on sensed objects in the environment.
Biography: Peter K. Allen is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Columbia University. He received the A.B. degree from Brown University in Mathematics-Economics, the M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the recipient of the Rubinoff Award for innovative uses of computers. His current research interests include real-time computer vision, dexterous robotic hands, 3-D modeling and medical robotics.
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Last update:19 September, 2008