Closed-Loop Tactile Controller for Tool Manipulation

Yuki Shirai, Devesh K. Jha, Arvind Raghunathan, Dennis Hong

Keywords: Manipulation, Tactile Sensing, Contacts

TL;DR: This paper presents a simultaneous estimation and control framework for robotic tool manipulation.

Abstract: In this paper, we present closed-loop control of a complex manipulation task where a robot uses a tool to interact with objects. Manipulation using a tool leads to complex kinematics and contact constraints that need to be satisfied for generating feasible manipulation trajectories. We first present an open-loop controller design using Non-Linear Programming (NLP) that satisfies these constraints. In order to design a closed-loop controller, we present a pose estimator of objects and tools using tactile sensors. Using our tactile estimator, we design a closed-loop controller based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). The proposed algorithm is verified using a 6 DoF manipulator on tasks using a variety of objects and tools. We verify that our closed-loop controller can successfully perform tool manipulation under several unexpected contacts. All hardware experiment videos could be found at $\href{https://youtu.be/VsClK04qDhk}{https://youtu.be/VsClK04qDhk}$.