Revisiting Proprioceptive Sensing for Articulated Object Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper revisits the use of proprioceptive sensing in robotic manipulation of articulated objects, demonstrating a system that leverages proprioception during contact to open cabinets, and discusses its potential benefits and limitations.

Contribution

The authors develop a system that uses proprioceptive sensing during contact for cabinet opening, highlighting its performance and raising questions about its advantages over vision-only approaches.

Findings

Proprioceptive sensing can improve manipulation performance.

Slip between gripper and handle limits system effectiveness.

The system performs well despite challenges.

Abstract

Robots that assist humans will need to interact with articulated objects such as cabinets or microwaves. Early work on creating systems for doing so used proprioceptive sensing to estimate joint mechanisms during contact. However, nowadays, almost all systems use only vision and no longer consider proprioceptive information during contact. We believe that proprioceptive information during contact is a valuable source of information and did not find clear motivation for not using it in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we create a system that, starting from a given grasp, uses proprioceptive sensing to open cabinets with a position-controlled robot and a parallel gripper. We perform a qualitative evaluation of this system, where we find that slip between the gripper and handle limits the performance. Nonetheless, we find that the system already performs quite well. This poses the question: should we make more use of proprioceptive information during contact in articulated object manipulation systems, or is it not worth the added complexity, and can we manage with vision alone? We do not have an answer to this question, but we hope to spark some discussion on the matter. The codebase and videos of the system are available at https://tlpss.github.io/revisiting-proprioception-for-articulated-manipulation/.