Emergency Stopping for Liquid-manipulating Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model predictive control-based emergency stopping system for robots manipulating liquids, ensuring spill-free halts in hazardous situations through optimal trajectories.

Contribution

It formulates emergency stopping as an optimal control problem and integrates it as a safety layer with existing liquid manipulation methods.

Findings

Achieves fast, spill-free emergency stops in simulation and real robot tests.

Operates as a plug-and-play safety layer for existing liquid manipulation systems.

Handles nonlinear liquid dynamics effectively during emergency stops.

Abstract

Manipulating open liquid containers is challenging because liquids are highly sensitive to vessel accelerations and jerks. Although spill-free liquid manipulation has been widely studied, emergency stopping under unexpected hazards has received little attention, despite the fact that abrupt braking may cause hazardous spills. This letter presents an emergency stop system for robots manipulating liquids in open containers. We formulate emergency stopping as an optimal control problem and solve it in a model predictive control framework to generate time-optimal, spill-free stopping trajectories. The method operates as a plug-and-play safety layer on top of existing slosh-free motion planning methods, enabling immediate reaction to detected hazards while accounting for nonlinear liquid dynamics. We demonstrate, through simulation and on a 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda robot, that the proposed approach achieves fast emergency stopping without spilling.