this paper aims to discuss the requirements of safe and smooth trajectory planning of transporter mobile robots to perform non-prehensile object manipulation task. in non-prehensile approach, the robot and the object must keep their grasp-less contact during manipulation task. to this end, dynamic grasp concept is employed for a box manipulation task and corresponding conditions are obtained an...

One of existing approaches to path planning problems uses a potential function to represent the topological structure of the free space. Newtonian potential was used in [1] to represent object and obstacles in the two-dimensional (2-D) workspace wherein their boundaries are assumed to be uniformly charged. In this paper, more general, nonuniform distributions are considered. It is shown that fo...

We provide an analysis of a recent path planning method which uses probabilistic roadmaps. This method has proven very successful in practice, but the theoretical understanding of its performance is still limited. Assuming that a path exists between two configurations a and b of the robot, we study the dependence of the failure probability to connect a and b on: 1) the length of ; 2) the distan...

We explain how some recent results on the design of controls for nonoholomic systems without drift can be extended to some classes of sytems with drift. In particular, we show that a dynamic extension of a driftless system that satisses the Lie algebra rank condition necessary satisses algebraic suucient conditions for small-time local controllability at all its equilibrium points.

In this paper, we review rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) for motion planning, experiment with them on standard control problems, and extend them to the case of hybrid systems.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the classification and retrieval of interactions between human characters and objects. We propose to use the interaction bisector surface (IBS) between the body and the object as a feature of the interaction. We define a multi-resolution representation of the body structure, and compute a correspondence matrix hierarchy that describes which parts o...

Modular manipulator designs have long been been considered for use as research tools, and as the basis for easily modified industrial manipulators. In these manipulators the links and joints are discrete and modular components that can be assembled into a desired manipulator configuration. As hardware advances have made actual modular manipulators practical, various capabilities of such manipul...

We establish sharp upper bounds for the topological complexity TC(X) of motion planning algorithms in topological spaces X such that the fundamental group is “small”, i.e. when π1(X) is cyclic of order ≤ 3 or has cohomological dimension ≤ 2.