Graphics enhanced version of this site

Manipulation of Pose Distributions
M. Moll and M. Erdmann
tech. report CMU-CS-00-111, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, March, 2000.

Jump to: Download | Abstract | Notes | Text Reference | BibTeX Reference

Adobe portable document format (pdf) [702 KB]
Compressed postscript (ps.gz) [847 KB]

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

For assembly tasks parts often have to be oriented before they can be put in an assembly. The results presented in this report are a component of the automated design of parts orienting devices. The focus is on orienting parts with minimal sensing and manipulation. We present a new approach to parts orienting through the manipulation of pose distributions. Through dynamic simulation we can determine the pose distribution for an object being dropped from an arbitrary height onto an arbitrary surface. By varying the drop height and the shape of the support surface we can find the initial conditions that will result in a pose distribution with minimal entropy. We are trying to uniquely orient a part with high probability just by varying the initial conditions. We will derive a condition on the pose and velocity of an object in contact with a sloped surface that will allow us to quickly determine the final resting configuration of the object. This condition can then be used to quickly compute the pose distribution. We also present simulation and experimental results that show how dynamic simulation can be used to find optimal shapes and drop heights for a given part.

Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Grant ID: IRI-9503648

Associated lab/group: Manipulation Lab

M. Moll and M. Erdmann, Manipulation of Pose Distributions, tech. report CMU-CS-00-111, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, March, 2000.

@techreport{Moll_2000_3324,
   author = "Mark Moll and Michael Erdmann",
   title = "Manipulation of Pose Distributions",
   institution = "Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University",
   month = "March",
   year = "2000",
   number = "CMU-CS-00-111",
   address = "Pittsburgh, PA"
}