Author: Zhanat Kappassov

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

Robots have improved industry processes, most recognizably in conveyor-belt assemblysystems, and have the potential to bring even more benefits to our society in transportation,exploration of dangerous zones, deep sea or even other planets, health care and inour everyday life. A major barrier to their escape from fenced industrial areas to environmentsco-shared with humans is their poor skills in physical interaction tasks, includingmanipulation of objects. While the dexterity in manipulation is not affected by the blindnessin humans, it dramatically decreases in robots. With no visual perception, robotoperations are limited to static environments, whereas the real world is a highly variantenvironment.In this thesis, we propose a different approach that considers controlling contact betweena robot and the environment during physical interactions. However, current physicalinteraction control approaches are poor in terms of the range of tasks that can beperformed. To allow robots to perform more tasks, we derive tactile features representingdeformations of the mechanically compliant sensing surface of a tactile sensor andincorporate these features to a robot controller via touch-dependent and task-dependenttactile feature mapping matrices.As a first contribution, we show how image processing algorithms can be used todiscover the underlying three dimensional structure of a contact frame between an objectand an array of pressure sensing elements with a mechanically compliant surfaceattached onto a robot arm's end-effector interacting with this object. These algorithmsobtain as outputs the so-called tactile features. As a second contribution, we design a tactileservoing controller that combines these tactile features with a position/torque controllerof the robot arm. It allows the end-effector of the arm to steer the contact frame ina desired manner by regulating errors in these features. Finally, as a last contribution, weextend this controller by adding a task description layer to address four common issuesin robotics: exploration, manipulation, recognition, and co-manipulation of objects.Throughout this thesis, we make emphasis on developing algorithms that work notonly with simulated robots but also with real ones. Thus, all these contributions havebeen evaluated in experiments conducted with at least one real robot. In general, thiswork aims to provide the robotics community with a unified framework to that will allowrobot arms to be more dexterous and autonomous. Preliminary works are proposedfor extending this framework to perform tasks that involve multicontact control withmultifingered robot hands.