Embracing Contact: Pushing Multiple Objects with Robot's Forearm

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel robot manipulation method that uses the robot's forearm to push multiple objects simultaneously, improving efficiency over traditional pick-and-place strategies.

Contribution

It presents a new approach leveraging nonprehensile pushing with the robot's forearm to handle multiple objects, enhancing manipulation capabilities beyond end-effector-only methods.

Findings

Greedy pushing strategy reduces task time by 28%

Using forearm pushes enables handling multiple objects simultaneously

Improves efficiency over traditional pick-and-place methods

Abstract

Grasping is the dominant approach for robot manipulation, but only a single object can be grasped at a time. Nonprehensile manipulation offers richer set of interactions, however state-of-the-art is limited to using the end-effector only. We propose using a robot link (forearm) to push multiple objects at once. In a simulated task where the robot's task is to sort two kinds of objects into their respective goal regions, we show that a greedy strategy that uses a combination of forearm pushes and pick and place operations reduces task completion time by %28 compared to picking and placing each object individually.