An Efficient Closed-Form Method for Optimal Hybrid Force-Velocity Control
This provides an efficient solution for robotic manipulation tasks involving contact constraints, though it appears incremental as it builds on previous work.
The paper tackles the problem of computing hybrid force-velocity control by deriving a closed-form method that maximizes kinematic conditioning, resulting in solutions that are 7 to 40 times faster than previous search-based techniques while improving robustness to kinematic singularities.
This paper derives a closed-form method for computing hybrid force-velocity control. The key idea is to maximize the kinematic conditioning of the mechanical system, which includes a robot, free objects, a rigid environment and contact constraints. The method is complete, in that it always produces an optimal/near optimal solution when a solution exists. It is efficient, since it is in closed form, avoiding the iterative search of previous work. We test the method on 78,000 randomly generated test cases. The method outperforms our previous search-based technique by being from 7 to 40 times faster, while consistently producing better solutions in the sense of robustness to kinematic singularity. We also test the method in several representative manipulation experiments.