Special issue "Sensor Fusion". Estimation of Contact Position Between Grasped Object and Environment Based on Sensor Fusion of Vision and Force.

摘要

Robots require various techniques of sensor fusion to effectively achieve manipulation tasks. This paper presents a sensor fusion method of vision and force information to estimate contact position between a grasped object and other object in the environment. This technique plays an important role especially in assembly tasks since manipula-tion of an object only using visual information often falls into difficulties because of occlusions caused by the grasped object, surrounding objects, and the manipulator itself. In such situations, force sensor information helps to estimate the contact position even when the exact contact position is invisible. Consequently, sensor fusion of vision and force allows us to improve adaptability of robot systems to changing situations in the task. Experiments using actual robot system demonstrate usefulness of the proposed method. We will also discuss research issues on sensor planning to select sensor information taking into account the fusion of vision and force.