MERL - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

TR2022-045

Robust Pivoting: Exploiting Frictional Stability Using Bilevel Optimization

Abstract:

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 interaction with uncertainty in physical properties of the object. In this paper, we study robust optimization for control of pivoting manipulation in the presence of uncertainties. We present insights about how friction can be exploited to compensate for the inaccuracies in the estimates of the physical properties during manipulation. In particular, we derive analytical expressions for stability margin provided by friction during pivoting manipulation. This margin is then used in a bilevel trajectory optimization algorithm to design a controller that maximizes this stability margin to provide robustness against uncertainty in physical properties of the object. We demonstrate our proposed method using a 6 DoF manipulator for manipulating several different objects.

 

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  •  Shirai, Y., Jha, D.K., Raghunathan, A., Romeres, D., "Robust Pivoting Manipulation Using Bilevel Contact-Implicit Optimization", RSS Workshop on The Science of Bumping into Things, June 2022.
    BibTeX TR2022-090 PDF
    • @inproceedings{Shirai2022jun,
    • author = {Shirai, Yuki and Jha, Devesh K. and Raghunathan, Arvind and Romeres, Diego},
    • title = {Robust Pivoting Manipulation Using Bilevel Contact-Implicit Optimization},
    • booktitle = {RSS Workshop on The Science of Bumping into Things},
    • year = 2022,
    • month = jun,
    • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-090}
    • }
  •  Shirai, Y., Jha, D.K., Raghunathan, A., Romeres, D., "https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11412", arXiv, March 2022.
    BibTeX arXiv
    • @article{Shirai2022mar2,
    • author = {Shirai, Yuki and Jha, Devesh K. and Raghunathan, Arvind and Romeres, Diego},
    • title = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11412},
    • journal = {arXiv},
    • year = 2022,
    • month = mar,
    • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11412}
    • }