posted on 2011-05-01, 00:00authored byGurdayal S. Koonjul, Garth ZeglinGarth Zeglin, Nancy Pollard
Manipulators with compliant actuation exhibit passive joint displacements when exposed to external forces or collisions. This paper demonstrates that this displacement information is sufficient to infer a coarse estimate of the location of an incidental collision. Three techniques for contact point detection are compared: a closed-form inference model based on a serial chain with joint springs, a variation on Self Posture Changeability, and an empirical memory-based model of joint trajectories. The methods were experimentally tested using a Shadow Hand on an industrial Motoman SDA10 arm to quantify localization performance, actively discover and avoid a thin obstacle and localize and grasp a cup