Indirect Manipulation of a Sphere on a Flat Disk Using Force Information

The objective of this study is to verify if only the use of robotic force feedback enables indirect anddynamic manipulations which are difficult for human beings to perform. Human beings usually control thetrajectory of an object using visual feedback; force/tactile information are secondarily employed because they arefurther qualitative in comparison with visual information. However, it is supposed that robots have the potentialto perform such the tasks without visual information because force/tactile information can be also usedquantitatively in the control system. This paper especially focuses on an indirect manipulation of a sphere on aflat plate realized by employing only force information. In this paper, we propose a very simple method to estimatethe position of the sphere on the plate which is put on a multi-fingered robot and try to control the trajectory bychanging the fingertip heights based on the error between the desired and estimated positions. We also analyze thestability of the proposed control system with an approximate Lyapunov’s stability criterion. Finally, this papershows very attractive robotic demonstrations based on the proposed method.