Capture Regions for Grasping, Manipulating and Re-orienting Parts

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Abstract IIS-9907009Ponce, JeanUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign$108,395 - 12 mos.CAPTURE REGIONS FOR GRASPING, MANIPULATING AND RE-ORIENTING PARTSThis is the first year of a three-year continuing award. The PI addresses the problem of manipulating an object using a succession of contacts with simple robotic devices that may have discrete or continuous degrees of freedom. The problem of planning the overall object trajectory is reduced to constructing a sequence of atomic robot motions between equilibrium states of the system. The proposed approach is based on constructing the capture region of each equilibrium, i.e., the maximal subset of the object's configurationspace such that any motion starting within this subset is guaranteed to end up in the equilibrium configuration. In particular, contact is not assumed to maintain during the execution of the manipulation task; nor is there any attempt to predict the object motion between equilibria. This approach will be applied to three problems: (1) grasping and in-hand manipulation in the presence of frictional effects and large position uncertainties, (2) motion planning for mobile robots pushing an object while avoiding obstacles, and (3) re-orienting parts by dropping them on a simple mechanism reminiscent of Pachinko machines. Progress will be assessed by conducting experiments with actual robotic devices, including four Nomadic Super Scout II mobile robots and prototypes of the reconfigurable gripper and of the proposed Pachinko machine developed at the University of Illinois. The main applications of the proposed research are in manufacturing, including part feeding and industrial assembly. Longer-term applications include the control of teams of domestic robots as they perform chores around a house.