Planning finger movements to lift up deformable 2D objects

This paper describes a strategy to lift up a deformable 2D object resting on a horizontal plane. Inspired by human hand lifting behavior, the strategy plans grasping trajectories of two fingertips using modified Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT). Compared to a straight squeeze, a planned finger movement not only enlarges the graspable region, but also minimizes the work. Improvements on control complexity and robustness are made through modifications to RRT. The introduced strategy is applicable to both hollow and solid 2D objects, and is extendable to 3D ones.