Stabilization of Complementarity Systems via Contact-Aware Controllers
This addresses the problem of stable and robust control in robotics for tasks like manipulation and locomotion, offering a non-combinatorial method that improves upon heuristic or ad hoc approaches, though it appears incremental in advancing contact-aware control.
The paper tackles the challenge of controlling robotic systems during contact-rich tasks by proposing a control framework that uses tactile information and complementarity structure to synthesize stable policies, demonstrating effectiveness in numerical examples and an experimental underactuated multi-contact system.
We propose a control framework which can utilize tactile information by exploiting the complementarity structure of contact dynamics. Since many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking contact with the environment, state-of-the-art control policies struggle to deal with the hybrid nature of multi-contact motion. Such controllers often rely heavily upon heuristics or, due to the combinatorial structure in the dynamics, are unsuitable for real-time control. Principled deployment of tactile sensors offers a promising mechanism for stable and robust control, but modern approaches often use this data in an ad hoc manner, for instance to guide guarded moves. This framework can close the loop on tactile sensors and it is non-combinatorial, enabling optimization algorithms to automatically synthesize provably stable control policies. We demonstrate this approach on multiple numerical examples, including quasi-static friction problems and a high dimensional problem with ten contacts. We also validate our results on an experimental setup and show the effectiveness of the proposed method on an underactuated multi-contact system.