Robotics: Science and Systems IX

A Control Framework for Tactile Servoing

Qiang Li, Carsten Schürmann, Robert Haschke, Helge Ritter

Abstract:

The advent of sensor arrays providing tactile feedback with high spatial and temporal resolution ask for new control strategies to exploit this important and valuable sensory channel for grasping and manipulation tasks. In this paper, we introduce a control framework to realize a whole set of tactile servoing tasks, i.e. control tasks, which intend to realize a specific tactile interaction pattern. This includes such simple tasks like tracking a touched object, maintaining both contact location and contact force, as well as more elaborate tasks like tracking the object pose or tactile object exploration. Exploiting methods known from image processing, we introduce robust feature extraction methods to estimate the 2D contact position, the contact force, and the orientation of an object edge being in contact to the sensor. The flexible control framework allows to adapt the PID-type controller to a large range of different tasks by specification of a selection matrix. We demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of the proposed control framework in a series of experiments employing a 16 x 16 tactile sensor array attached to a Kuka LWR as a "large" fingertip.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Li-RSS-13, 
    AUTHOR    = {Qiang Li AND Carsten Schürmann AND Robert Haschke AND Helge Ritter}, 
    TITLE     = {A Control Framework for Tactile Servoing}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2013}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Berlin, Germany}, 
    MONTH     = {June},
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2013.IX.045} 
}