Rolling with deformable fingertips

The superiority of deformable human fingertips as compared to hard robot gripper fingers for grasping and manipulation has lead to a number of investigations with robot hands employing elastomers or materials such as fluids or powders beneath a membrane at the fingertips. When using such materials, it is important to account for their properties during manipulation. The rigid-body rolling kinematic equations developed and applied in previous investigations do not consider load- and object-dependent fingertip deformations. This paper is concerned with determining the kinematic effects of soft fingertips during manipulation with rolling. The long-term goal of this work is to produce a model of rolling with soft fingertips that can be incorporated into a real-time control system to produce current best estimates of contact locations and velocities when planning and executing rolling maneuvers.