Grasping and manipulation of objects with robotic hands is an active area of research
in robotics, and several grasp analysis approaches have been proposed in the literature to identify stable grasps. However, most of them use rigid body mechanics and point contact models to describe the contact between object and hand. Furthermore, the actual distribution of contact tractions (normal and shear) is not considered and the contacts are represented by their resultant wrenches. In this work, a novel solid mechanics based framework is developed for robotic grasp analysis. The existing contact models are reformulated based on contact areas, and grasp analysis is performed using closed form solutions available in solid mechanics. Based on these formulations and closed form solutions, a novel grasp performance index  is developed for grasp evaluation.
A finite element (FE) framework is then designed for robotic grasp analysis using
contact tractions and the performance index.. Grasping is performed for different combinations of objects and hands in the FE framework, and it is shown that the proposed framework is capable of analyzing the robotic grasps based on physical characteristics of object and hand in dynamic conditions. A FE based parametric study is also conducted to show how these attributes influence the stability of grasp in various stages of grasping. The efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated by benchmarking the results with existing simulator. Experimental studies are carried out to validate the results obtained from simulation and to establish the utility of the proposed framework.