This award is in the Small Grants for Exploratory Research mode. The central idea of this research is to explore ways to reduce the complexity and force and torque requirements of a robotic mechanism by designing the environment to minimize the physical forces that must be overcome in a manipulation task. Thus, for example, for two dimensional manipulation, moving friction can be greatly reduced by use of an air table on which the manipulanda are placed. Reducing the forces should yield great gains in simplicity of required manipulation mechanisms, which can be made much lighter, and which should have far less nonlinearity in their action (due to motor loads, hysteresis, backlash, etc.). This initial year of exploration will be confined to manipulation in planar workspaces. Ultimately, the basic idea should lead to new mechanisms that can be used in low-force, low-torque, or low- gravity applications.
