Adaptive Compliant Robot Control with Failure Recovery for Object Press-Fitting

TL;DR

This paper introduces ACCIFR, an adaptive compliant control method with failure recovery for mobile manipulators to reliably perform press-fit tasks like stacking milk cartons, improving adaptability and safety.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated failure recovery mechanism within a demonstration learning-based compliant control framework for press-fit tasks.

Findings

Outperforms baseline in adaptability to environmental variations.

Effectively detects and recovers from collision failures.

Demonstrates robustness in miniature container setup.

Abstract

Loading of shipping containers for dairy products often includes a press-fit task, which involves manually stacking milk cartons in a container without using pallets or packaging. Automating this task with a mobile manipulator can reduce worker strain, and also enhance the efficiency and safety of the container loading process. This paper proposes an approach called Adaptive Compliant Control with Integrated Failure Recovery (ACCIFR), which enables a mobile manipulator to reliably perform the press-fit task. We base the approach on a demonstration learning-based compliant control framework, such that we integrate a monitoring and failure recovery mechanism for successful task execution. Concretely, we monitor the execution through distance and force feedback, detect collisions while the robot is performing the press-fit task, and use wrench measurements to classify the direction of collision; this information informs the subsequent recovery process. We evaluate the method on a miniature container setup, considering variations in the (i) starting position of the end effector, (ii) goal configuration, and (iii) object grasping position. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline demonstration-based learning framework regarding adaptability to environmental variations and the ability to recover from collision failures, making it a promising solution for practical press-fit applications.