Revisiting Proprioceptive Sensing for Articulated Object Manipulation

Thomas Lips, Francis wyffels

Keywords: articulated object manipulation, proprioceptive sensing

TL;DR: We create a system to open articulated objects with a position-controlled robot using only proprioceptive sensing and discuss the performance and failure modes.

Abstract: Robots that assist humans will need to interact with articulated objects such as cabinets or microwaves. Early work on creating systems for doing so used proprioceptive sensing to estimate joint mechanisms during contact. However, nowadays, almost all systems use only vision and no longer consider proprioceptive information during contact. We believe that proprioceptive information during contact is a valuable source of information and did not find clear motivation for not using it in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we create a system that, starting from a given grasp, uses proprioceptive sensing to open cabinets with a position-controlled robot and a parallel gripper. We perform a qualitative evaluation of this system, where we find that slip between the gripper and handle limits the performance. Nonetheless, we find that the system already performs quite well. This poses the question: should we make more use of proprioceptive information during contact in articulated object manipulation systems, or is it not worth the added complexity, and can we manage with vision alone? We do not have an answer to this question, but we hope to spark some discussion on the matter. The codebase and videos of the system are available \href{https://github.com/tlpss/cabinet-manipulation-eef}{here}.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2305.09584/code)