Disk-on-Disk Rolling Manipulation Project

Overview

Nonprehensile manipulation primitives such as rolling, sliding, pushing, and throwing are commonly used by humans but are often avoided by robots, who generally use grasping. Dynamic nonprehensile manipulation raises challenges in high-speed sensing and control, as the manipulated object is not in static equilibrium throughout the process which would be the case with standard grasping. An advantage, however, is that dynamics can be exploited to help the robot control object motions that would otherwise be impossible. Our long-term goal is to develop a unified framework for planning and control of dynamic robotic manipulation. A typical manipulation plan consists of a sequence of manipulation primitives chosen from a library of primitives, with each primitive equipped with its own feedback controller. Problems of interest include planning the motion of the manipulator to achieve the desired motion of the object and feedback control to stabilize the desired trajectory. As a first step to understand the nature of dynamic nonprehensile manipulation, we study feedback stabilization of a canonical rolling problem: balancing a disk-shaped object on top of a disk-shaped manipulator (referred to as the hand) in a vertical plane.