Nonprehensile Pushing Manipulation Strategies for a Multi-Limb Robot

This paper explores the control strategy for a multi-limb robot nonprehensilely pushing an object to slide on the floor. The robot's limb distals perform point contacts with the object and the floor. The contact velocity constraint and force constraint are proposed to prevent separation and restrict the system forces. Then the constraints are combined with the system dynamic models to obtain bounds on the system states. We solve the motion planning problem by selecting a feasible path in the reduced-dimensional space and generating the system trajectory along the selected path. An example is provided to illustrate the application of our technique on the physical platform.