Efficient Hitting with different links of a Redundant Robotic Manipulator

This paper builds up the skill of impact aware non prehensile manipulation through a hitting motion of a redundant robot arm by allowing it to come in contact with the environment with the appropriate link according to the requirements of the hitting task. In tasks where directional effective inertia of a robot is important at the contact point, it is useful to understand inertia at different links, so as to select the appropriate link. Hitting with those links allows us to manipulate a wider range of object masses since the robot effective inertia is different at different links. We propose a learning based methodology for selecting a hitting link based on the hitting task specifications, impact posture generation for the robot and an automated generation of desired directional inertia values throughout the hitting motion.