Two-finger caging-based grasping region determination of polygonal space debris with motion parameters uncertainty

Grasping space debris is an emerging challenge due to lack of fixed grasping points and the limitation of known information. Multi-finger caging-based grasping, in which multi-finger surrounds an object and makes it inescapable from the “cage� composed of multi-finger, offers a robust object grasping approach. In this paper, for planar polygonal space debris with motion parameters uncertainty, an algorithm to find the feasible two-finger cage formations based on the contact-space formulations is proposed. First, considering the motion parameters uncertainty of space debris, the motion envelope of planar polygonal space debris, which includes all the possible positions of the planar polygonal space debris during the transient caging process, is regarded as the substitution of space debris. Then, the caging graph of space debris in contact space is constructed based on the geometry of the space debris, and it is an undirected graph. Starting from a given initial two-finger caging formation of space debris, the caging graph is utilized to search for the feasible caging set, i.e. the caging regions. Finally, an example is carried out to illustrate and validate the proposed algorithm.