Characterization of Grasp Configurations for Multi-Robot Object Pushing

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of characterizing the quality of a contact configuration with respect to a planar pushing manipulation task, which represents a common non-prehensile manipulation primitive. In particular, a series of indices are proposed as a suitable characterization and are evaluated against metrics expressing both the energy efficiency and efficacy of a manipulation task. Furthermore, the selection of the optimal configuration for a given task is presented as a case study to show possible applications of the proposed characterization. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the proposed procedure represents the first attempt to characterize the quality of a grasp configuration for the non prehensile pushing task.