ABSTRACT
This paper investigates local observability of the pose and motion of a curved three-dimensional object rolling on a rough horizontal plane. The plane models a con trollable robotic palm imbued with tactile sensors. The palm can accelerate in arbitrary translational directions and the tactile sensors can determine the contact loca tion between the palm and the rolling object at every in stant in time. The object and contact motions are gov erned by a nonlinear system derived from the kinemat ics and dynamics of rolling. Through cotangent space decomposition, a sufficient condition on local observ ability of the system is obtained. This condition de pends only on the differential geometry of contact and on the object’s angular inertia matrix; it is satisfied by all but some degenerate shapes such as a sphere.
