From nominal to robust planning: the plate-ball manipulation system

Robotic manipulation by rolling contacts is an appealing method for achieving dexterity with relatively simple hardware. While there exist techniques for planning motions of rigid bodies in rolling contact under nominal conditions, an inescapable challenge is the design of robust controllers of provable performance in the presence of model perturbations. As a preliminary step in this direction, we present in this paper an iterative robust planner of arbitrary accuracy for the plate-ball manipulation system subject to perturbations on the sphere radius. The basic tool is an exact geometric planner for the nominal system, whose repeated application guarantees the desired robustness property on the basis of the iterative steering paradigm. Simulation results under perturbed conditions show the effectiveness of the method.