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Parking objects by pushing using uncalibrated visual servoing

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Abstract

Pushing is one of the strategies to perform robotic manipulation when the object is too large or too heavy. Motivated by this, we address the problem of how to push an object on a plane to a target pose with two cooperating robots. The main contribution is a new uncalibrated image-based control scheme that computes the required motion of the object to reach the target pose. Then, as an application of this control scheme, we study the conditions that allow performing the task of pushing the object with two robots. The setup consists of a fixed external uncalibrated camera looking at the workspace where the object and the robots stand. The task is defined with a target image of the object in the desired pose. The proposed control scheme computes the motion commands of the pusher robots and, as a result, they translate and rotate the object by imposing non-holonomic velocity constraints. This yields smooth, continuous and efficient trajectories. The stability of the control scheme is also proven. Experiments illustrate the performance of the control scheme.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by French Government research program Investissements d’avenir through the RobotEx Equipment of Excellence (ANR-10-EQPX-44), the LabEx IMobS3 (ANR7107LABX716701) and I-SITE Project (CAP 20-25) and by Spanish Government/European Union through Project DPI2015-69376-R (MINECO/FEDER).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009, Saragossa, Spain

    Gonzalo López-Nicolás

  2. Université Clermont Auvergne, CNRS, SIGMA Clermont, Institut Pascal, 63000, Clermont-Ferrand, France

    Erol Özgür & Youcef Mezouar

Authors
  1. Gonzalo López-Nicolás
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  2. Erol Özgür
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  3. Youcef Mezouar
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Correspondence to Gonzalo López-Nicolás.

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López-Nicolás, G., Özgür, E. & Mezouar, Y. Parking objects by pushing using uncalibrated visual servoing. Auton Robot 43, 1063–1078 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-018-9782-x

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