To be useful in human environments, robots must be able to do things that people do on a daily basis -- things like opening doors, drawers, and cabinets. We perform those actions effortlessly, but getting a robot to do the same is another story. Now Georgia Tech researchers have come up with a promising approach.
Professor Charlie Kemp and Advait Jain at Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Laboratory have programmed a robot to autonomously approach and open doors and drawers. It does that using omni-directional wheels and compliant arms, and the only information it needs is the location and orientation of the handles.
The researchers discussed their results yesterday at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Anchorage, Alaska, where they presented a paper, "Pulling Open Doors and Drawers: Coordinating an Omni-Directional Base and a Compliant Arm with Equilibrium Point Control."
One of the neat things about their method is that the robot is not stationary while opening the door or drawer. "While pulling on the handle," they write in their paper, "the robot haptically infers the mechanism's kinematics in order to adapt the motion of its base and arm."
In other words, most researchers trying to make robots open doors, cabinets, and similar things rely on a simple approach: keep the robot's base in place and move its arms to perform the task. It's easier to do -- and in fact that's how most robot manipulation but limits the kinds of tasks a robot could accomplish.
The Georgia Tech researchers allow their robot to move its omni-directional base while simultaneously pulling things open -- an approach they say improves the performance of the task.
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