Speaker:Ling Tang

Robotic Manipulation of Hand Tools: The Case of Screwdriving

The robotic hand is still no match for the human hand on many skills. Manipulation of hand tools, which usually requires sophisticated finger movements and fine controls, not only poses a clear technical challenge but also carries a great potential for enabling the robot to assist humans in a wide range of tasks accomplishable using tools. This talk focuses on one of the most common tool manipulation tasks in life — screwdriving. First, we investigate how a robotic arm mounts a rigidly attached screwdriver onto a screw (pre-mounted in a tapped hole) and then tightens it using the tool. Various control policies, over position, impedance, and admittance, are integrated smoothly to execute this fine manipulation task. Then, the work is extended to fastening with a robotic hand, which integrates estimation, contact modeling, rolling, finger gaiting, grasping, dynamics (of both the tool and robot), and controls.