A Tactile-based Grasping Strategy for Deformable Objects' Manipulation and Deformability Estimation

Grasping and manipulating deformable objects with a robot hand has several interesting challenges. Deformable objects, due to its texture and deformability, present different features from rigid ones and that issue can cause uncontrolled movements during grasping and/or manipulation. The paper presents a control strategy for grasping deformable objects, focused on elastic foams, based on tactile information. An adaptation at different elastic properties of the object is achieved, because the deformability degree is estimated during the grasping process. Several experiments are shown in order to demonstrate the reliability of the tactile-based strategy.