Exploiting elastic energy storage for cyclic manipulation: Modeling, stability, and observations for dribbling

For creating robots that are capable of human like performance in terms of speed, energetic properties, and robustness, intrinsic compliance is a promising design element. In this paper we investigate the effects of elastic energy storage and release for ball dribbling in terms of cycle stability. We base the analysis on error evolution, peak power performance during hand contact, and robustness with respect to varying hand stiffness. As the ball can only be controlled during contact, an intrinsically elastic hand extends the contact time and improves the energetic characteristics of the process. As a human is able to dribble blindly, we decided to focus on the case of contact force sensing only, i.e. no vision is used in our approach.