Analysis of motion in contact and its application to mechanical assembly

Mechanical assembly and disassembly occupy a dominant part of maintenance tasks at atomic power plants. It is very significant that such tasks can be realized by robot manipulators, considering the hazardous environments at the plants. This paper presents an analysis of motions of mechanical parts in contact under the assumptions that the shapes of the parts are polyhedron and that there is no friction between them. The results are applied to the position/force hybrid control and detections of the transitions between the contact states of parts. (author)