Sensitive manipulation

This thesis presents an effective alternative to the traditional approach to robotic manipulation. In our approach, manipulation is mainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. The motivation comes from the fact that manipulating an object implies coming in contact with it, consequently, directly sensing physical contact seems more important than vision to control the interaction of the object and the robot. In this work, the traditional approach of a highly precise arm and vision system controlled by a model-based architecture is replaced by one that uses a low mechanical impedance arm with dense tactile sensing and exploration capabilities run by a behavior-based architecture. The robot OBRERO has been built to implement this approach. New tactile sensing technology has been developed and mounted on the robot's hand. These sensors are biologically inspired and present more adequate features for manipulation than those of state of the art tactile sensors. The robot's limb was built with compliant actuators, which present low mechanical impedance, to make the interaction between the robot and the environment safer than that of a traditional high-stiffness arm. A new actuator was created to fit in the hand size constraints.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Torres-Jara, Eduardo R. (Eduardo Rafael), 1972-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rodney Brooks.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38535

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38535