ICRA 2018 - Stable Prehensile Pushing

Stable Prehensile Pushing: In-Hand Manipulation with Alternating Sticking Contacts

Abstract — We present an approach to in-hand manipulation planning that exploits the mechanics of alternating sticking contact. Particularly, we consider the problem of manipulating a grasped object using external pushes for which the pusher sticks to the object. Given the physical properties of the object, frictional coefficients at contacts and a desired grasp on the object, we propose a sampling-based planning framework that builds a pushing strategy concatenating different feasible stable pushes to achieve the desired regrasp. An efficient dynamics formulation for stable prehensile pushing allows us to plan in-hand manipulations 100-1000 times faster than our previous work which builds upon a complementarity formulation. Experimental observations for the generated plans show very close correspondence to the expected results from the planner.