Gripper positioning for object deformation tasks

Shape control involves bringing a deformable object to a desired shape. In the shape control literature, the positioning of the grippers on the object is usually predefined (user-defined) and therefore considered as input information. In this paper we address the gripper positioning problem for shape control. We propose a deformation process within a simulated fully-actuated scenario and introduce multi-scale centroid paths as geometry describing points for which we prove individual control feasibility. Analysis on the evolution of multi-scale centroid paths through the fully-actuated deformation process allows us to define an importance metric for gripper candidates. Final gripper positions, based on the importance metric, are obtained through optimisation. We present simulation results for global and local shape control problems.