Robotic Grasping of Large Objects for Collaborative Manipulation

In near future, robots are envisioned to work alongside humans in professional anddomestic environments without significant restructuring of workspace. Roboticsystems in such setups must be adept at observation, analysis and rational de-cision making. To coexist in an environment, humans and robots will need tointeract and cooperate for multiple tasks. A fundamental such task is the manip-ulation of large objects in work environments which requires cooperation betweenmultiple manipulating agents for load sharing. Collaborative manipulation hasbeen studied in the literature with the focus on multi-agent planning and controlstrategies. However, for a collaborative manipulation task, grasp planning alsoplays a pivotal role in cooperation and task completion.In this work, a novel approach is proposed for collaborative grasping and manipu-lation of large unknown objects. The manipulation task was defined as a sequenceof poses and expected external wrench acting on the target object. In a two-agentmanipulation task, the proposed approach selects a grasp for the second agentafter observing the grasp location of the first agent. The solution is computed ina way that it minimizes the grasp wrenches by load sharing between both agents.To verify the proposed methodology, an online system for human-robot manipu-lation of unknown objects was developed. The system utilized depth informationfrom a fixed Kinect sensor for perception and decision making for a human-robotcollaborative lift-up. Experiments with multiple objects substantiated that theproposed method results in an optimal load sharing despite limited informationand partial observability