Evaluating The Quality Of Non-Prehensile Balancing Grasps

Assessing grasp quality and, subsequently, predicting grasp success is useful for avoiding failures in many autonomous robotic applications. In addition, interest in non-prehensile grasping and manipulation has been growing as it offers the potential for a large increase in dexterity. However, while force-closure grasping has been the subject of intense study for many years, few existing works have considered quality metrics for non-prehensile grasps. Furthermore, no studies exist to validate them in practice. In this work we use a real-world data set of non-prehensile balancing grasps and use it to experimentally validate a wrench-based quality metric by means of its grasp success prediction capability. The overall accuracy of up to 84% is encouraging and in line with existing results for force-closure grasps.