Autonomous dual-arm mobile manipulator crew assistant for surface operations: Force/vision-guided grasping

Abstract

Objective of the overall system is that of understanding (and demonstrating) what are the tasks that a robotic crew assistant must be able to execute, in order to be effective for space exploration missions. One of the most important tasks to be accomplished is the autonomous grasping of objects, which has been achieved through a vision and force-based control strategy. This paper deals with the completion of the autonomous grasping task previously described.

Dual arm manipulation—A survey

“…In [94], a dual-arm crew-assisting robotic system for space exploration missions is examined. The goal is the system to autonomously grasp objects using a vision and force-based control strategy.…”

“…As an example, an image-based visual servoing technique is presented in the work of [74] that uses the image Jacobian matrix to control multi-fingered robot hands. Furthermore, the use of planar markers as the guide for image-based visual servoing has been exploited in [94].…”

“…The case of an end-effector mounted vision system has been studied in [90]. The work of [94] examines a robotic system for space exploration missions that has two arms, each with a camera mounted on the end-effector and uses an image-based visual servoing strategy. Recently, the popular PR2 robot has also adopted, apart from an active head, an eye-in-hand camera configuration with limited reported results yet.…”

A redundancy based control law for executing a coordinated vision-based task using a dual arm robotic system

“…Although it offers nice properties (possibility of using several cameras [6], good robustness with respect to modelling errors [7]), to the best of our knowledge, there are only few works which have used it for dual arm manipulation [1]. We may nonetheless mention the works by Miyabe [8], Hynes [9], Zereik [10] and Vahrenkamp [11] where this control approach is used to grasp an object with one or both arms [8], [10], [11] or tie surgical nodes [9]. However, in these works, the arms are separately or alternatively controlled, which means that the coordination problem is not really addressed.…”

Simultaneous operation of dual arm and body of mobile robots

“…Due to the large number of actuators required for these robots, their operating devices require a large space, and may have to be operated by several individuals (Figure 1). Although dual-armed machines have been studied [10], [11], [12], [12], [13], [14], these systems do not allow movement of the arms and body simultaneously. This is especially important for Àoating robots, such as underwater robots, allowing the simultaneous operation of its arms and body.…”