Cooperative Payload Estimation by a Team of Mocobots

TL;DR

This paper presents a cooperative method for mobile robot teams to autonomously estimate payload properties and attachment points through collaborative manipulation, using force and motion data to improve manipulation accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach enabling robots to discover payload attachment points, mass, and inertia collaboratively during manipulation, validated with real-world experiments.

Findings

Successful estimation of payload's center of mass and inertia matrix

Effective cooperative manipulation demonstrated with three mocobots

Method enhances autonomous payload handling capabilities

Abstract

For high-performance autonomous manipulation of a payload by a mobile manipulator team, or for collaborative manipulation with the human, robots should be able to discover where other robots are attached to the payload, as well as the payload's mass and inertial properties. In this paper, we describe a method for the robots to autonomously discover this information. The robots cooperatively manipulate the payload, and the twist, twist derivative, and wrench data at their grasp frames are used to estimate the transformation matrices between the grasp frames, the location of the payload's center of mass, and the payload's inertia matrix. The method is validated experimentally with a team of three mobile cobots, or mocobots.