Modeling of Food Shapes with Variations Based on Spherical Harmonics for Food Manipulation Experiments

This paper focuses on three-dimensional food samples for food manipulation research. Each shapes of foods are diverse. Even focusing on specific food item, we often find large individual differences in shapes, sizes and mechanical properties. Such variation affects food manipulation. In this paper, we focus on three-dimensional shapes of green peppers. First, we measured three-dimensional shapes of green peppers. We applied spherical harmonics to approximate the surface of the green peppers. We also proposed a method to generate variance of food shapes, followed by fabrication of food samples. Finally, we conducted experiments of pick-and-place operations using real and sample green peppers.