Manipulation Planning to Keep an Object Stable under a Sequence of External Forces

We present a planner for a robot to keep an object stable under a sequence of external forces. We assume a robot with multiple manipulators, with a gripper at the end of each manipulator. We make two key contributions: First, given an external force, we propose a method to check the feasibility of gripper placements on the object to resist the force. This method takes into account both the manipulator joint torque limits and the force/torque limits of the grippers-object system. Second, given a sequence of external forces, we propose a planner that generates a sequence of gripper placements and manipulator configurations, along with the motion to move between these configurations. The planner minimizes the number of different gripper placements required to resist the forces, resulting in efficient planning and execution. We perform experiments to verify the predictions of our feasibility checking method and to measure the performance of our planner.