Statics of Soft-fingered Grasping and Manipulation

Abstract

In Chap. 3, we formulated a simple 1D elastic model of hemispherical soft fingertips with a couple of variables: the contact orientation θp and the maximum finger displacement d, which was expressed as Eq. 3.15. In that chapter, the concept of the LMEE was introduced, and the elastic equilibrium of the fingers was revealed theoretically and experimentally. Unlike the analysis of the simple 1D model, the 2D model has six variables during a two-fingered manipulation process. In this chapter, we implement a static analysis of the overall elastic energy function including the gravitational force, which was improved as a 2D model described in Eq. 4.5. The existence of the LMEEwC (Fig. 4.9) will be ascertained through the numerical optimization method mentioned in Sect. 5.3.