Four-Arm Collaboration: Two Dual-Arm Robots Work Together to Maneuver Tethered Tools

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collaborative planning approach for two dual-arm robots to manipulate tethered tools, enabling improved tool handling and collision avoidance through assistance in cable management and task execution.

Contribution

It presents a novel planner that coordinates dual-arm robots to collaboratively manipulate tethered tools, addressing cable tension and collision challenges in tool regrasping and handovers.

Findings

Successful simulation validation of the planner.

Real-world experiments demonstrating effective collaboration.

Enhanced safety and efficiency in tool manipulation tasks.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a planner for a master dual-arm robot to manipulate tethered tools with an assistant dual-arm robot's help. The assistant robot provides assistance to the master robot by manipulating the tool cable and avoiding collisions. The provided assistance allows the master robot to perform tool placements on the robot workspace table to regrasp the tool, which would typically fail since the tool cable tension may change the tool positions. It also allows the master robot to perform tool handovers, which would normally cause entanglements or collisions with the cable and the environment without the assistance. Simulations and real-world experiments are performed to validate the proposed planner.