RMPs for Safe Impedance Control in Contact-Rich Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method combining Riemannian Motion Policies with variable impedance control to learn safer contact-rich manipulation behaviors, addressing safety and reusability issues in robotic manipulation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel integration of Riemannian Motion Policies with impedance control for safer, adaptable manipulation in contact-rich tasks.

Findings

Enhanced safety in manipulation behaviors

Improved adaptability to environment changes

Effective learning of contact-rich tasks

Abstract

Variable impedance control in operation-space is a promising approach to learning contact-rich manipulation behaviors. One of the main challenges with this approach is producing a manipulation behavior that ensures the safety of the arm and the environment. Such behavior is typically implemented via a reward function that penalizes unsafe actions (e.g. obstacle collision, joint limit extension), but that approach is not always effective and does not result in behaviors that can be reused in slightly different environments. We show how to combine Riemannian Motion Policies, a class of policies that dynamically generate motion in the presence of safety and collision constraints, with variable impedance operation-space control to learn safer contact-rich manipulation behaviors.