Stability of soft-finger grasp under gravity

We discuss grasp stability under gravity where each finger makes soft-finger contact with an object. By clustering polygon models of a finger and an object, the contact area between a finger and an object is obtained as the common area between an object cluster and a finger cluster. Then, by assuming the Winkler elastic foundation, the pressure distribution within the contact area is obtained. By using this pressure distribution, we show that we can judge grasp stability under soft-finger contact. We further consider defining a quality measure of a soft-finger grasp by assuming that although the gravitational force is applied to an object, the direction of gravity is unknown. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we show several numerical examples.