Estimating the Center of Mass of an Unknown Object for Nonprehensile Manipulation

Abstract

With the increasing prevalence of robot-led automation in many fields such as industry, health-care, agriculture, etc., robot manipulator arms are often required to handle sophisticated manipulation tasks in which both the object and environmental physical parameters are unknown. In order to deal with these tasks, fast and accurate estimation of the inertial parameters of the object and frictional characteristics of flooring surfaces are of crucial importance toward developing intelligent and efficient object manipulation strategies. In this work, we propose an integrated framework for estimating the center of mass of an unknown planar object using a force sensor-less manipulator arm pushing the object on a horizontal plane. We evaluate two algorithmic solutions through extensive pusher-slider frictional interaction simulations. The result shows that the proposed framework can estimate the center of mass location efficiently and accurately only with a few pushing interactions.