Opening a door with a humanoid robot using multi-sensory tactile feedback

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-sensor based generic approach to opening doors for a dexterous robot. Once the handle has been located by a computer vision algorithm and properly grasped, we are able to open doors without using a model or other prior knowledge of the door geometry. This is done by combining the sensor information of both a force-torque sensor in the robot wrist and a tactile sensor matrix in the robot gripper itself. Our experimental results show that the combination of both sensors achieves the most successful way to open the door.