TABLE OF CONTENTS Lydia E. Kavraki Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
Florent Lamiraux Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
Christopher Holleman Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
This paper investigates the problem of path planning for a thin elastic plate. The underlying geometric model for the plate is provided by a B zier representation. The geometric model is augmented by a realistic mechanical model. The latter permits the computation of the shape of the plate with respect to a set of grasping constraints by minimizing the elastic energy of the deformation. We use a probabilistic roadmap planner to compute paths for the plate and we present a number of experimental results to illustrate our approach. Our work is a first step towards considering the physical properties of objects when planning.
The problem of planning a path for a robot consisting of rigid parts has been studied extensively over the last decade [17, 21]. This paper describes a first step in the direction of solving a variant of the above problem, namely the problem of planning a path for a flexible robot/part. We focus on the case of an elastic metal plate to illustrate our approach and explore some of the issues arising when considering flexible parts.
Several important applications motivate our research: in industrial settings there is a need to manipulate sheets of metal [26], pipes that can bend [31], and cables [25]. In assembly maintainability studies done...
