The Synthesis of Force-Closure Grasps

This paper addresses the problem of synthesizing planar grasps that have force-closure. A grasp on an object is a force-closure grasp if and only if we can exert, through the set of contacts, arbitrary force and moment on this object. Equivalently, any motion of the object is resisted by a contact force; that is the object cannot break contact with the finger tips without some non-zero external work. The force-closure constraint is addressed from three different points of view: mathematics, physics, and computational geometry. The last formulation results in fast and simple polynomial time algorithms for directly constructing force-closure grasps. We can also find grasps where each finger has an independent region of contact on the set of edges.