Non-prehensile Manipulation

Non-prehensile manipulation refers to manipulating objects without grasping them — instead using pushing, rolling, pivoting, flipping, tilting, or other contact strategies that leverage gravity and surface friction. For example, pushing a box across a table to position it, or nudging a peg upright before grasping it. Non-prehensile strategies can move objects into graspable configurations, reposition items too large to grasp, or work in cluttered scenes where a grasp approach is infeasible. Planning non-prehensile actions requires modeling quasi-static or dynamic object mechanics and contact physics, making it an active research topic at the intersection of manipulation and motion planning.