Simulation of grasping deformable objects with a virtual human hand

This paper addresses a largely open problem in haptic simulation and rendering: contact force and deformation modeling for haptic simulation of grasping a deformable object with a realistic virtual human hand, especially in power grasps. The virtual hand model consists of meshes of realistic shapes for the finger links and palm of a hand. We tackle the problem by adopting the non-linear contact force model and the beam-skeleton model for global shape deformation introduced in [5]. The results verify the efficiency of contact force and deformation modeling for both power grasp and precision grasp of deformable objects with reasonable realism.