Maximizing the Use of Environmental Constraints: A Pushing-Based Hybrid Position/Force Assembly Skill for Contact-Rich Tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pushing-based hybrid position/force assembly skill that actively maximizes environmental constraints during contact-rich tasks, significantly improving success rates in robotic assembly.

Contribution

It presents the first method to incorporate pushing actions during assembly tasks to enhance environmental constraint utilization, demonstrating its effectiveness with mobile manipulators.

Findings

Achieved 100% success rate in assembly tasks

Proved the skill maximizes environmental constraints

First to incorporate pushing actions during assembly

Abstract

The need for contact-rich tasks is rapidly growing in modern manufacturing settings. However, few traditional robotic assembly skills consider environmental constraints during task execution, and most of them use these constraints as termination conditions. In this study, we present a pushing-based hybrid position/force assembly skill that can maximize environmental constraints during task execution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers using pushing actions during the execution of the assembly tasks. We have proved that our skill can maximize the utilization of environmental constraints using mobile manipulator system assembly task experiments, and achieve a 100\% success rate in the executions.