Aditya Patankar

Aditya Patankar

Postdoctoral Associate. Task specification, grasping and motion planning for robot manipulation.

Manipulation with environment contact

Motion, force and trajectory planning for tasks where the object stays in contact with the environment, such as pivoting a heavy box about its edge.

To grasp and manipulate a wide range of objects, robotic hands and manipulators can make effective use of the environment. Many tasks are accomplished by using contacts between the grasped object and the environment, for example pivoting a heavy box about one of its edges instead of lifting it. We have developed algorithmic approaches for motion and force planning for manipulating objects this way, while considering the nonlinear contact constraints.

A robot pivoting a box through intermediate poses
Object gaiting: pivoting a box through a sequence of intermediate poses.

More recently, we developed a general formulation for path-constrained, time-optimized trajectory planning with environmental and object contacts.

A time-optimized trajectory for tilting a tray with a cube on it, with the contact forces over time.

Papers