A NEW PRINCIPLE OF CONTROLLING CONTACT FORCES IN INTERACTIVE GRASPING SIMULATION

The paper proposes a new method to interactively simulate grasping of virtual product concepts with the goal to evaluate the contact forces between the hand and product as well as the load on the human arm. Interaction between product concepts and the users happens in a virtual environment, where the user controls a virtual hand interactively. The contact between the virtual hand is simulated and visual feedback is provided to the user. Controlling the virtual hand interactively in real time holds many challenges. One of the biggest challenges is mapping the motion of the user to contact forces, which then results in stable grasping of objects. In this paper we present a new approach to convert and map the measured position of the real hand into contact forces so that the contact between the virtual hand and the object remains stable. Our approach applies a multi-objective optimization that takes into account the posture and anthropometric properties of grasping, as well as the penetration of the hand in the grasped object in order to find the optimal arrangement of contact forces. The paper reports on the on the principle of our grasping control approach as well as on some test cases to show the advantages and disadvantages.