Stable poses of 3-dimensional objects

This paper considers the gravitational stability of a frictionless 3-dimensional object in contact with immovable objects. Arbitrarily curved objects are considered. This paper also shows how to determine the region over which the object's center of mass can move while the object maintains a given set of contacts and remains in stable equilibrium. We present symbolic solutions for up to three contacts and discuss numerical solutions for larger numbers of contacts. This analysis has application in planning the motions of quasi-statically walking robots over uneven terrain and the manipulation of heavy objects.

[1]  Jeffrey C. Trinkle,et al.  Second-order stability cells of a frictionless rigid body grasped by rigid fingers , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  David J. Kriegman.  Computing stable poses of piecewise smooth objects , 1992, CVGIP Image Underst..

[3]  Arthur C. Sanderson,et al.  Minimization of energy in quasi-static manipulation , 1988, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[4]  Jean-Daniel Boissonnat,et al.  On characterizing and computing three- and four-finger force-closure grasps of polyhedral objects , 1993, [1993] Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[5]  J. Burdick,et al.  A configuration space analysis of bodies in contact. I: 1st order mobility , 1995 .

[6]  Joel W. Burdick,et al.  The stability of heavy objects with multiple contacts , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  A. S. Rao,et al.  Computing a Statistical Distribution of Stable Poses for a Polyhedron , 1992 .

[8]  Matthew T. Mason,et al.  Mechanical parts orienting: The case of a polyhedron on a table , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.