Robust Execution of Contact-Rich Motion Plans by Hybrid Force-Velocity Control
This addresses the challenge of reliable robot manipulation in contact-rich environments, representing an incremental improvement in control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of robustly executing contact-rich motion plans for robots by proposing a hybrid force-velocity control algorithm, which efficiently computes control actions through optimization and demonstrates effectiveness in manipulation tasks.
In hybrid force-velocity control, the robot can use velocity control in some directions to follow a trajectory, while performing force control in other directions to maintain contacts with the environment regardless of positional errors. We call this way of executing a trajectory hybrid servoing. We propose an algorithm to compute hybrid force-velocity control actions for hybrid servoing. We quantify the robustness of a control action and make trade-offs between different requirements by formulating the control synthesis as optimization problems. Our method can efficiently compute the dimensions, directions and magnitudes of force and velocity controls. We demonstrated by experiments the effectiveness of our method in several contact-rich manipulation tasks. Link to the video: https://youtu.be/KtSNmvwOenM.