Embracing Safe Contacts with Contact-aware Planning and Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a contact-aware control and planning framework for robots that allows safe interaction with environments by managing contact forces, demonstrated on a Franka robot in a task inspired by Amazon stowing.

Contribution

It presents a novel contact-aware controller and extends a sampling-based planner to safely incorporate contact interactions in robotic manipulation.

Findings

Effective in maintaining safe contact forces during tasks

Successfully demonstrated on a real Franka robot

Enhances robotic interaction capabilities in complex environments

Abstract

Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free fashion, to avoid damaging their environment. In a departure from such a traditional approach, this work presents a contact-aware controller for reference tracking that maintains interaction forces on the surface of the robot below a safety threshold in the presence of both rigid and soft contacts. Furthermore, we leveraged the proposed controller to extend the BiTRRT sample-based planning method to be contact-aware, using a simplified contact model. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated in hardware experiments using a Franka robot in a setup inspired by the Amazon stowing task. A demo video of our results can be seen here: https://youtu.be/2WeYytauhNg