Dynamic Pushing Strategies for Dynamically Stable Mobile Manipulators

© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper presents three effective manipulation strategies for wheeled, dynamically balancing robots with articulated links. By comparing these strategies through analysis, simulation and robot experiments, we show that contact placement and body posture have a significant impact on the robot's ability to accelerate and displace environment objects. Given object geometry and friction parameters we determine the most effective methods for utilizing wheel torque to perform non-prehensile manipulation