Robust Pivoting Manipulation using Contact Implicit Bilevel Optimization
This work addresses the problem of generalizable manipulation for robots in uncertain environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing optimization techniques for a specific task.
The paper tackles robust planning for pivoting manipulation under uncertainty in physical properties by deriving an analytical stability margin from friction and using it in a Contact Implicit Bilevel Optimization framework to maximize robustness, demonstrating the method with a 6 DoF manipulator and an MPC controller for object manipulation.
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interactions with uncertainty in physical properties of the object and the environment. In this paper, we study robust optimization for planning of pivoting manipulation in the presence of uncertainties. We present insights about how friction can be exploited to compensate for inaccuracies in the estimates of the physical properties during manipulation. Under certain assumptions, we derive analytical expressions for stability margin provided by friction during pivoting manipulation. This margin is then used in a Contact Implicit Bilevel Optimization (CIBO) framework to optimize a trajectory that maximizes this stability margin to provide robustness against uncertainty in several physical parameters of the object. We present analysis of the stability margin with respect to several parameters involved in the underlying bilevel optimization problem. We demonstrate our proposed method using a 6 DoF manipulator for manipulating several different objects. We also design and validate an MPC controller using the proposed algorithm which can track and regulate the position of the object during manipulation.