This paper discusses dynamic manipulation inspired by the handling mechanism of a pizza chef. The chef handles a tool called ldquopizza peel,rdquo where a plate is attached at the tip of a bar, and he remotely manipulates a pizza on the plate. We found that he aggressively utilizes only two degrees of freedom (DOFs) from the remote handling location during manipulation: translation along the bar and rotation about the bar. From the viewpoint of a dynamic system, the inertial loads for these specific DOFs are never affected by the length of the bar. This is important for the production of quick plate motions so that the object on the plate can be dynamically and remotely manipulated. Applying this handling mechanism to a robot system, we first reveal how to make the object's motion for three DOFs by using two DOFs of plate motion. We then show that it is guaranteed to achieve an arbitrary desired set of position and orientation of the object by the proposed manipulation scheme. The proposed method has good manipulability because the translational motion of the object can be fully decoupled from the rotational motion (though notviceversa). Finally, we show a couple of experiments that confirm the basic idea.

This paper discusses a dexterous hyper plate inspired by pizza manipulation. We first discuss the necessary combinations of active degrees of freedom of the plate for manipulating an object to arbitrary position and orientation on the plate, under the gravity. While there are nine patterns for choosing two active degrees of freedom of the plate, we show one of them can satisfy a sufficient condition for manipulating the object with the weakest coupling among object’s motions and eventually leads to a simple manipulation scheme. A couple of experiments are shown to confirm the basic idea.