Grasp Planning and Force Control

The goal of this project is to develop grasp planning and force control algorithms for performing manipulation tasks.

Grasp Planning: Much of the work in grasp planning has focused on development of grasp plans and grasp metrics for pick-and-place operations. However, pick-and-place is only one type of manipulation task. Frequently, a robot has to grasp an object to perform other manipulation tasks with it, e.g., in assistive feeding, grasping a spoon to scoop cereal from a bowl. Also, the robot may want to grasp/contact an object perform non-prehensile manipulation where it can use support surfaces from the environment to manipulate an object (e.g., grasp a heavy object to reposition it by pivoting on the ground). Our goal is to formalize the notion of task-oriented grasping and planning and develop metrics and algorithms for the same. Please see below for more details about our initial approach and results.

Force Control: Impedance control is a way of indirectly controlling force at the robot-environment contact by modeling the constitutive properties at the contact with a stiffness and damping matrix. Although the theoretical aspects of impedance control is well-established, a key aspect of successful implementation of impedance control is the appropriate selection of the stiffness and damping matrices, which is a manual process. Our goal in this work is to develop automated ways of selecting the stiffness and damping matrix so that the robot can determine task-relevant impedance parameters autonomously. Please see below for more details about our initial approach and results on a semi-autonomous way to select the stiffness and damping matrices for impedance control (this work was done in collaboration with Carlos Saldarriaga and Imin Kao at SBU).

Publications

1. C. Saldarriaga, N. Chakraborty, and I. Kao, ``Damping Selection for Cartesian Impedance Control with Dynamic Response Modulation", IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Accepted. September 2021.

2. A. Fakhari, A. Patankar, J. Xie, and N. Chakraborty, ``Computing a Task-dependent Grasp Metric Using Second Order Cone Programs", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Prague, Czech Republic, September, 2021.

3. A. Patankar, A. Fakhari, and N. Chakraborty, ``Hand-Object Contact Force Synthesis for Manipulating Objects by Exploiting Environment", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Las Vegas, NV, USA, October, 2020.

4. C. Saldarriaga, N. Chakraborty, and I. Kao, ``Joint Space Stiffness and Damping for Cartesian and Null Space Impedance Control of Redundant Robotic Manipulators", International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR), Hanoi, Vietnam, October, 2019.