This paper discusses the non-grasp dynamic manipulation of a deformable object inspired by the handling mechanism of pizza master. The master handles a tool 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 two DOFs (degrees of freedom), such that the linear motion along the bar and the rotational one around the bar, in order to produce quick plate motions for dynamically manipulating the object. Applying this handling mechanism to the robot system, we first show how to rotate an object by using the two DOFs of plate motion. We then reveal that the deformation of the object generated by dynamic effects can drastically contribute to high-speed and stable rotation, just like human steps for turn on the floor. By both simulation and experiment, we show that there exists the optimum plate motion leading to the maximum rotational speed of the object.

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.