Optimal tightening forces for multi-fingered robust manipulation

We address the problem of choosing adequate contact forces to ensure the stability of a multi-fingered grasp in face of external disturbances of unknown intensity. The contact forces we look for are tightening, pre-strain forces rather than active, direction-related blocking forces. We compute such tightening forces, together with blocking forces and a lower-bound approximation of an existing grasp quality measure, in only one linear programming problem. The tightening forces ensure robustness to the largest-minimum resisted disturbance wrench, but a variety of optimal contact forces may be further computed from the desired robustness by solving a quadratic programming problem.