Pushing is often used by robots as a simple way to manipulate the environment and has in the past been well studied from kinematic and numerical perspective. The paper proposes a qualitative approach to pushing convex polygonal objects by a simple wheeled robot through a single point contact. We show that by using qualitative reasoning, pushing dynamics can be described in concise and intuitive manner, that is still sufficient to control the robot to successfully manipulate objects. Using the QUIN program on numerical data collected by our robot while experimentally pushing objects of various shapes, we induce a model of pushing. This model is then used by our planning algorithm to push objects of previously unused shapes to given goal configurations. The produced trajectories are compared to smooth geometric solutions. Results show the correctness of our qualitative model of pushing and efficiency of the planning algorithm.
展开▼
