Abstract
Nonprehensile manipulation is the process of manipulating a part without a form- or force-closure grasp. Without such a grasp, the part is free to roll, slide, or break contact with the robot(s) manipulating it. Controlling the motion of a part using nonprehensile manipulation becomes the challenging problem of controlling a dynamic system with equations of motion incorporating the robot and part geometry, friction and restitution laws, and changing dynamics due to changing contact states. Drawing from the work of others and our own previous work, in this paper we pose several open problems in the control of nonprehensile manipulation.