Showing papers by "Michael A. Peshkin published in 1985"

The motion of a pushed, sliding object

Abstract: In many robotic applications, manipulation planning for an object free to slide on a surface is an import; oblem. Physical analysis of the object's motion is made difficult by the absence of information about 1 stribution of support of die object, and of the resulting frictional forces. This paper describes a n iproach to the analysis of sliding motion. The instantaneous motion of the object can be described as a pure rotation about a center of rotation (CO mewhere in the plane. In this paper we find the locus of CORs for all possible distributions of supp rces. We assume zero friction at the pusher-object contact, and we assume that the support foi stribution is confined to a disk. In one application to robotic manipulation, bounds on the distance an object must be pushed to come ii gnment with a robot finger or a fence are determined.-

A Modeless Convex Hull Algorithm for Simple Polygons.

Abstract: : This document presents an orner n algorithm which computes the convex hull of a two-dimensional non-self-intersecting polygon. The algorithm recovers much of the simplicity of the one presented by Sklansky and subsequently disproved. Unlike several algorithms which have been found since then, the modified algorithm executes a truly uniform (modeless) traversal of all the vertices of the polygon. This makes it possible to extend the algorithm to extract geometric information about the interior of the polygon. (Author).