Modeling and Control of 2-D Grasping of an Object with Arbitrary Shape under Rolling Contact

Modeling, control, and stabilization of dynamics of two-dimensional object grasping by using a pair of multijoint robot fingers are investigated under rolling contact constraints and an arbitrary geometry of the object and fingertips. First, a fundamental testbed problem of modeling and control of rolling motion between 2-D rigid bodies with an arbitrary shape is treated under the assumption that the two contour curves coincide at the contact point and share the same tangent. The rolling constraint induces the Euler equation of motion that is parameterized by a common arclength parameter and constrained onto the kernel space orthogonally complemented to the image space spanned from the constraint gradient. By extending the analysis to the problem of stable grasp of a 2-D object with an arbitrary shape by a pair of robot fingers, the Euler-Lagrange equation of motion of the overall fingers/object system parametrized by arclength parameters is derived, together with a couple of first-order differential equations that express evolutions of contact points in terms of the second fundamental form. It is shown that 2-D rolling constraints are integrable in the sense of Frobonius even if their Pfaffian forms are characterized by arclength parameters. A control signal called “blind grasping” is introduced and shown to be effective in stabilization of grasping without using the details of the object shape and parameters or external sensing. An extension of the Dirichlet-Lagrange stability theorem to a class of systems with DOF-redundancy under constraints is suggested by using a Morse-Bott-Lyapunov function.