For practical reasons, compliant materials are often used on the gripping surfaces of robotic hands. Such materials are not well described by the Coulomb friction law or by simple point-contact or line-contact kinematics. In this paper, a shearing model is used to describe the contact friction. Models ofpointed, curved, flat, soft, and soft-curved fingertips are then developed and compared in terms of their contribu tion to the stiffness and stability of a simple grasp. There is a spectrum of contact conditions defined by the fingertip radius and contact area relative to the object size. This spectrum provides insights for designing and controlling robotic fingers.
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