Multi-Contact Point Localization and Force Identification

Collaborative robots, which are becoming more and more popular nowadays, are designed to share a workspace with humans. Consequently, safe physical interaction under a collision or a contact has become an important research topic. To further understand and treat the physical interaction properly, there have been attempts to estimate contact location and force simultaneously.

We consider a collaborative robot equipped with proprioceptive sensors, in particular, joint torque sensors (JTSs) and a base force/torque (F/T) sensor. The proposed method has the following advantages. First, fast computation is achieved by proper preprocessing of robot meshes. Second, multi-contact can be identified with the aid of the base F/T sensor, while this is challenging when the robot is equipped with only JTSs. The proposed method is a modification of the standard particle filter to cope with mesh preprocessing and with available sensor data. 

Contact : Seo Wook Han (tjdnr7117@kaist.ac.kr)

Open position

None

Related Publications

S. W. Han, and M. J. Kim, “Proprioceptive Sensor-Based Simultaneous Multi-Contact Point Localization and Force Identification for Robotic Arms”, ICRA 2023 [IEEE] [arXiv]

Videos & Images

Attached video

ICRA2023 presentation video

The proposed algorithm MCP-EP tackles the problem of multi-contact point estimation
(Estimate 𝒓_(𝑐,𝑖)  and 𝑭_(𝑒𝑥𝑡,𝑖)  ).

MCP-EP utilizes proprioceptive sensors such as joint torque sensor (JTS) and base F/T sensor

Localization process with 'exploeration particles'