Capture Regions For Part Manipulation
Jean Ponce
Dept. of Computer Science and Beckman Institute
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
In this talk, I will present a brief overview of my research
group's activities in computer vision, then focus on our current work
in robotic planning. In particular, I will address the problem of
moving a polyhedral part in a plane through a succession of contacts
with simple mechanisms that may have discrete and/or continuous
degrees of freedom. The proposed approach is based on constructing
the capture region of each equilibrium of the part/robot system, i.e.,
the maximal subset of the part's configuration space such that any
motion starting within this subset is guaranteed to end up in the
equilibrium configuration. This reduces the problem of planning the
overall part trajectory to constructing a sequence of atomic robot
motions between equilibrium states. This approach does not assume that
contact is maintained during the execution of the manipulation task;
nor does it attempt to predict the object motion between equilibria. I
will illustrate it with two examples: grasping and in-hand
manipulation in the presence of large position uncertainties, and
motion planning for mobile robots pushing an object while avoiding
obstacles. I will present simulation results as well as preliminary
experiments with actual robotic devices, including a reconfigurable
gripper developed at the University of Illinois and a Nomadic Scout
mobile platform. I will conclude the talk with a discussion of current
limitations of our approach as well as plans for future work.
Eyal Amir
Last modified: Tue Nov 17 17:08:12 PST 1998