Related papers: An experiment to address conceptual difficulties i…
Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…
Planar sliding of objects is modeled and analyzed. The model can be used for non-prehensile manipulation of objects lying on a surface. We study possible motions generated by frictional contacts, such as those arising between a soft finger…
Motivated by the problem of formation control for vehicles moving at unit speed in three-dimensional space, we are led to models of gyroscopically interacting particles, which require the machinery of curves and frames to describe and…
A detailed set of experiments are described that capture over a 1000 different instances of the bounce of a golf ball. Video analysis is used to capture velocity and spin immediately prior to and subsequent to each bounce for a wide variety…
In everyday life collaboration tasks between human operators and robots, the former necessitate simple ways for programming new skills, the latter have to show adaptive capabilities to cope with environmental changes. The joint use of…
The flow of granular material in a rotating cylinder was simulated by molecular dynamics in two dimensions using spherical as well as nonspherical grains. At very low but constant angular velocity we found that the flow varies irregularly…
A common way to manipulate heavy objects is to maintain at least one point of the object in contact with the environment during the manipulation. When the object has a cylindrical shape or, in general, a curved edge, not only sliding and…
We discuss the analogy of the behaviour of films and drops of liquid on a rotating horizontal cylinder on the one hand and substrates with regular one-dimensional wettability patterns on the other hand. Based on the similarity between the…
The vorticity of world lines of observers associated to the rotation of a massive body was reported by Lense and Thirring more than a century ago. In their example the frame dragging effect induced by the vorticity, is directly (explicitly)…
One common source of error in video analysis is camera movement. The paper describes a simple frame of reference correction that students can employ to salvage otherwise corrupted video analysis data. Two examples are provided.
The dynamic behavior of a partially wetting polymer droplet driven over a nanostructured interface is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider the bead-spring model to represent a polymeric liquid that partially wets a…
The problem of a disc and a ball rolling on a horizontal plane without slipping is considered. Differential constrained equations are shown to be integrated when the trajectory of the point of contact is taken in a form of the natural…
We study an inverse problem for the wave equation, concerned with estimating the wave speed, aka velocity, from data gathered by an array of sources and receivers that emit probing signals and measure the resulting waves. The typical…
Among the intelligent safety technologies for road vehicles, active suspensions controlled by embedded computing elements for preventing rollover have received a lot of attention. The existing models for synthesizing and allocating forces…
This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion. A…
We propose a system that uses video as the input to track the position of objects relative to their surrounding environment in real-time. The neural network employed is trained on a 100% synthetic dataset coming from our own automated…
A realistic simulation environment is an essential tool in every roboticist's toolkit, with uses ranging from planning and control to training policies with reinforcement learning. Despite the centrality of simulation in modern robotics,…
In the study, analyzes were made for one-dimensional constant acceleration motion using the Arduino microcontroller and distance sensor, using the position and time values obtained for the movement of an object thrown from bottom to top…
Experiments are done by colliding a swinging bat with a stationary baseball or softball. Each collision was recorded with high-speed cameras, from which the post-impact speed, launch angle, and spin of the ball could be determined. Initial…
We show how the motion of free material test particles in arbitrary spatial flows is easily determined within the context of ordinary vector calculus. This may be useful for everyone, including engineers and other non-specialists, when…