Identification of contact conditions from position and velocity information

Abstract

This paper proposes an algorithm for identification of contact conditions between a grasped object and external environment from position and velocity information of a robot hand. The contact conditions mean contact type, contact position, and contact force. Soft finger contact type, line contact type, and plane contact type are considered in addition to point contact type. The contact type is identified by rank of the matrix that places estimated angular velocity of the object at contact point. Contact position, contact normal and contact line are also estimated. This method has the following merits as compared with the method using 6-axes force information described in the previous paper. The identification problem is reduced to the problem of solving linear equations. The required number of active sensing motion is less.