Robotic Grasping: How to Determine Contact Positions

This paper discusses one of the major problems of robotic grasping: how to determine the optimal position of the constraints on the object and the values of the forces that must be applied in order to have desired performance. A numerical method to solve the problem on the assumption of three points of contact with friction in bidimensional space is presented. The choice between the several possible solutions is made by an optimization criterion consisting of seeking the best response of the force system to the application of a disturbing external force. The proposed method has the advantage of being mainly based on simple geometrical considerations and requiring quite short computational time.