The Synthesis of Force-Closure Grasps

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of synthesizing planar grasps that have force closure. A grasp on an object is a force closure grasp if and only if we can exert, through the set of contacts, arbitrary force and moment on this object. Equivalently, any motion of the object is resisted by a contact force, that is the object cannot break contact with the finger tips without some non-zero external work. The force closure constraint is addressed from three different points of view: mathematics, physics, and computational geometry. The last formulation results in fast and simple polynomial time algorithms for directly constructing force closure grasps. We can also find grasps where each finger has an independent region of contact on the set of edges.