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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel in-hand manipulation planning method that leverages alternating sticking contacts and a sampling-based framework to efficiently generate stable pushing strategies for regrasping objects.

Contribution

It presents a new sampling-based planning approach utilizing stable sticking contacts, significantly improving planning speed over previous complementarity-based methods.

Findings

Planning speed increased by 100-1000 times

Generated plans enable precise object movement in grasp

Experimental validation confirms effectiveness of the approach

Abstract

This paper presents 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 regrasp 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 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 that the object precisely moves in the grasp as expected by the planner. Video Summary -- youtu.be/qOTKRJMx6Ho