A Quasi-static Model and Simulation Approach for Pushing, Grasping, and Jamming
This work addresses a bottleneck in non-prehensile manipulation planning and control for robotics, offering an incremental improvement by extending quasi-static models to handle grasping and jamming behaviors.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling grasping and jamming in robotic manipulation, which traditional quasi-static models could not capture, by developing a novel quasi-static model that maps manipulator velocities to object motion and proves solution existence, resulting in tractable Linear Complementarity Problems for efficient computation.
Quasi-static models of robotic motion with frictional contact provide a computationally efficient framework for analysis and have been widely used for planning and control of non-prehensile manipulation. In this work, we present a novel quasi-static model of planar manipulation that directly maps commanded manipulator velocities to object motion. While quasi-static models have traditionally been unable to capture grasping and jamming behaviors, our approach solves this issue by explicitly modeling the limiting behavior of a velocity-controlled manipulator. We retain the precise modeling of surface contact pressure distributions and efficient computation of contact-rich behaviors of previous methods and additionally prove existence of solutions for any desired manipulator motion. We derive continuous and time-stepping formulations, both posed as tractable Linear Complementarity Problems (LCPs).