Predicting Center of Mass by Iterative Pushing for Object Transportation and Manipulation

摘要

Robotic manipulation tasks rely on a plethora of environmental and payload information. One critical piece of information for accurate manipulation is the center of mass (CoM) of the object, which is essential for estimating the dynamic response of the system and determining the payload placement. Traditionally, the CoM of a payload is provided prior to manipulation. In order to create a more robust and comprehensive system, this information should be collected by the robotic agent before or during the task run time. This paper presents a method for approximating the CoM of a planar object using a small-scale mobile robot to inform manipulation tasks. On average, our system is able to converge on a CoM estimate in under 30 seconds in simulation and 20 seconds in experiment, with a relative error of 4.95% and 5.46%, respectively.