On two-finger grasping of deformable planar objects

Grasping a deformable object instantaneously requires maintaining equilibrium of its pre- and post-deformed shapes using the same set of forces. This paper studies the type of grasps generated by squeezing a planar object with two fingers. It is shown that the success of such a grasp is independent of the applied forces in the case of small deformation. Numerical algorithms are introduced to compute sets of squeeze grasps with small and large deformations modeled using the finite element method (FEM) based on the linear and nonlinear elasticity theories, respectively.