Dexterous Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation by Pivoting

摘要

In this paper a pivoting manipulation method has been presented to realize dexterous manipulation that enables precise displacement of heavy or bulky objects. Through this application, we believe that the application area of humanoid robot can be significantly extended. A sequence of pivoting motion composed of two phases has been proposed, manipulation control and robot stepping motion. In the former phase, an impedance control and balancing control framework was introduced to control the required contact force for grasping and to maintain stability during manipulation respectively. Resolved momentum control is adopted for stepping motion in the latter phase. We then showed a sequence of pivoting motion to transport the objects towards the desired direction. We have shown that the proposed pivoting manipulation can be effectively performed by computer simulation and experiments using a humanoid robot platform HRP-2. As a future work, the method will be improved to adapt to various object shapes of transportation in pursuit of wide application in future developments. One of other extension is the manipulation planning for more general trajectories with experimentation of both manipulation and stepping phases. Integration of identification of physical properties of the objects or environments (Yu et al., 1999, Debus et al., 2000) is also an important issue to improve the robot's dexterity.