Robot Grasping and Manipulation

Britannica defines a robot as any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. By extension, robotics is the engineering discipline dealing with robots' design, construction, and operation. Robots have increasingly been used in environments that require object grasping and manipulation. They are helpful in households where there may be a need to pick and place objects such as books, balls, toys, and manufacturing productions lines to pick and move products such as packaged goods and mechanical parts. Research in robotic grasping and manipulation is believed to have started as far back as the 1970s, mainly when science-fiction classic Westworld staged robots in a fictitious film.