Towards Whole Arm Manipulation by Contact State Transition

This paper discusses the whole arm manipulation allowing the contact state transition. For manipulation of an object under fully constrained, the contact state transition becomes necessary. In order to realize the object manipulation, we first derive the feasible direction of the object manipulation by analyzing the active/passive closure properties for every combination of contact states. Second, we derive the set of joint torque to move the object in the feasible direction. These analyses also provide the joint torque to realize the manipulation at the planned contact states. Effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by some simulation results. © 2006 IEEE

Randomized Planning and Control Strategy for Whole-Arm Manipulation of a Slippery Polygonal Object

The present paper introduces a planning and control strategy for whole-arm manipulation of a slippery polygonal object. Randomized planning methods are first proposed in order to generate contact state transitions, which help not only to reduce the amount of calculation required, but also to handle a hybrid system composed of a continuous system and a discrete system, which has a large search space and complicated constraints. Second, a novel control strategy, which can switch manipulation modes among quasi-static, dynamic, and caging manipulation depending on the situation, is proposed. This strategy not only can cope with changes in the mechanics of the system caused by contact state transitions, but also can increase the manipulation feasibility and reliability. The validity of the proposed methods is verified through simulations and experiments