Exploiting potential energy storage for cyclic manipulation: An analysis for elastic dribbling with an anthropomorphic robot

Abstract

For creating robots that are capable of human like performance in terms of speed, energetic properties, and robustness, intrinsic compliance is a promising design element for achieving this. In this paper we investigate the effects of elastic energy storage and release for ball dribbling in terms of cycle stability based on the analysis of error evolution, peak power performance during hand contact, and robustness with respect to varying finger stiffness. As the ball can only be controlled during contact, an intrinsically elastic finger extends the contact time and the energetic characteristics of the process. As a human is able to dribble blindly, we decided to develop the foundation for the case of contact force sensing only, i.e. no vision is used for our approach.