Modeling Deformations of General Parametric Shells Grasped by a Robot Hand

The robot hand applying force on a deformable object will result in a changing wrench space due to the varying shape and normal of the contact area. Design and analysis of a manipulation strategy thus depend on reliable modeling of the object's deformations as actions are performed. In this paper, shell-like objects are modeled. The classical shell theory [51], [37], [43], [19] assumes a parametrization along the two lines of curvature on the middle surface of a shell. Such a parametrization, while always existing locally, is very difficult, if not impossible, to derive for most surfaces. Generalization of the theory to an arbitrary parametric shell is therefore not immediate. This paper first extends the linear and nonlinear shell theories to describe extensional, shearing, and bending strains in terms of geometric invariants including the principal curvatures and vectors, and their related directional and covariant derivatives. To our knowledge, this is the first non-parametric ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TROB
• Authors: Jiang Tian, Yan-Bin Jia
• Keywords: Hardware, Parametric Shells, Robot Hand, Shell-like Objects, TROB 2010