IEEE ICMA 2012 Conference

Plenary Talk 3

Robot Interaction Control Using Force and Vision

Bruno Siciliano
Professor
PRISMA Lab
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica
Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Via Claudio 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy
E-mail bruno.siciliano@unina.it

Abstract:

Robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into human environments and is vigorously engaged in its new challenges. Interacting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will gradually touch people and their lives. Applications of intelligent robots that work in contact with humans are increasing, which involve, e.g., haptic interfaces and teleoperators, cooperative material-handling, power extenders and such high-volume markets as rehabilitation, physical training, entertainment. In this scenario, the problem of controlling the physical interaction between the robot and the human is of concern. This talk is aimed at presenting a unified framework for development of robot interaction control schemes using vision and force; vision provides global information on the surrounding environment to be used for motion planning and obstacle avoidance, while force allows adjusting the robot motion so that the local constraints imposed by the environment are satisfied. The proposed solution is to adopt position-based visual servoing when the robot is far from the object, where the relative pose of the robot with respect to the object is estimated recursively using only vision. On the other hand, when the robot is in contact with the object, any kind of force control strategy can be adopted (hybrid force/position control, parallel force/position control, impedance control), and the relative pose of the robot with respect to the object is estimated recursively using vision, force and joint position measurements. Remarkably, all control schemes are experimentally tested on a setup consisting of an industrial robot with open control architecture, force/torque sensor and hybrid camera. Some results with a dual-arm system are also discussed. The presentation will be accompanied by videos.

Bruno Siciliano   is Professor of Control and Robotics, and Director of the PRISMA Lab in the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering at University of Naples Federico II. His research interests include force and visual control, human-robot interaction, cooperative manipulation and aerial robotics. He has co-authored 7 books, 70 journal papers, 170 conference papers and book chapters. He has delivered 90 invited lectures and seminars at institutions worldwide, and he has been the recipient of several awards. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ASME and IFAC. He is Co-Editor of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, and of the Springer Handbook of Robotics which received the PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics. His team is currently involved in six FP7 European projects. Professor Siciliano is the Past-President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.