A Dual-Arm Robot that Manipulates Heavy Plates Cooperatively with a Vacuum Lifter
Shogo Hayakawa, Weiwei Wan, Keisuke Koyama, Kensuke Harada

TL;DR
This paper presents a dual-arm robot system with planning and control methods to cooperatively manipulate heavy plates using a vacuum lifter, replacing human workers and improving efficiency and safety.
Contribution
It introduces a novel manipulation planning framework using a Manipulation State Graph and a velocity-based impedance controller for robot-vacuum lifter collaboration.
Findings
Effective robot-vacuum lifter cooperation demonstrated in real-world experiments.
The system can manipulate large, heavy plates with high flexibility.
Planning and control methods improve safety and efficiency in heavy object handling.
Abstract
A vacuum lifter is widely used to hold and pick up large, heavy, and flat objects. Conventionally, when using a vacuum lifter, a human worker watches the state of a running vacuum lifter and adjusts the object's pose to maintain balance. In this work, we propose using a dual-arm robot to replace the human workers and develop planning and control methods for a dual-arm robot to raise a heavy plate with the help of a vacuum lifter. The methods help the robot determine its actions by considering the vacuum lifer's suction position and suction force limits. The essence of the methods is two-fold. First, we build a Manipulation State Graph (MSG) to store the weighted logical relations of various plate contact states and robot/vacuum lifter configurations, and search the graph to plan efficient and low-cost robot manipulation sequences. Second, we develop a velocity-based impedance controller…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRobot Manipulation and Learning · Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Robotics · Soft Robotics and Applications
