Mathematics in Caging of Robotics

Abstract

It is a crucial problem in robotics field to cage an object using robots like multifingered hand. However the problem what is the caging for general geometrical objects and robots has not been well-described in mathematics though there were many rigorous studies on the methods how to cage an object by certain robots. In this article, we investigate the caging problem more mathematically and describe the problem in terms of recursion of the simple euclidean moves. Using this description, we show that the caging has the degree of difficulty which is closely related to a combinatorial problem and a wire puzzle. It implies that in order to capture an object by caging, from a practical viewpoint the difficulty plays an important role.