Nonprehensile Manipulation Control and Task Planning for Deformable Object Manipulation: Results from the RoDyMan Project

This chapter aims the broadcasting of the results achieved by the RoDyMan project about the task planning manipulation of deformable objects, and the nonprehensile manipulation control. The final demonstrator of the project is a pizza-making process. After an introduction to the general topic of nonprehensile manipulation, the mechatronic design and the high-level software architecture are described. Then, the smoothed particle hydrodynamic formulation is briefly introduced, along with the description of a detection method for a deformable object. The task planning for stretching a modelling clay, emulating the pizza dough, is sketched. After, the problematic control objective is split into several nonprehensile motion primitives: holonomic and nonholonomic rolling, friction-induced manipulation, and tossing are the described primitives. This chapter highlights the achievements reached so far by the project, and pave the way towards future research directions.