Geometric Derived Information Spaces in Manipulation with Mechanical Contact

This paper describes methods applicable to the modeling and control of mechanical contact, particularly those that experience uncertain stick/slip phenomena. Geometric kinematic reductions are used to show how to reduce a system´s description from a second-order dynamic model with frictional disturbances coming from a function space to a first-order model with frictional disturbances coming from a space of finite automata over a finite set. As a result, modeling for purposes of control in the resulting derived information space is made more straight-forward by getting rid of some dependencies on low-level mechanics (in particular, the details of friction modeling). Moreover, the online estimation of the uncertain variables in the derived information space has reduced sensing requirements. Results are illustrated using an actuator array model.