Manipulation of unknown objects via contact configuration regulation
Neel Doshi, Orion Taylor, Alberto Rodríguez
Abstract
We present an approach to robotic manipulation of unknown objects through regulation of the object's contact configuration: the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the object, robot, and environment. A contact configu-ration constrains the forces and motions that can be applied to the object; however, synthesizing these constraints generally requires knowledge of the object's pose and geometry. We develop an object-agnostic approach for estimation and control that circumvents this need. Our framework directly estimates a set of wrench and motion constraints which it uses to regulate the contact configuration. We use this to reactively manipulate unknown planar objects in the gravity plane. A video describing our work can be found on our project page: http://mcube.mit.edu/research/contactConfig.html.