Contact-Aware Controller Design for Complementarity Systems

Understand

While many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking contact with the environment, state-of-the-art control policies struggle to deal with the hybrid nature of multi-contact motion.

• Such controllers often rely heavily upon heuristics or, due to the combinatoric structure in the dynamics, are unsuitable for real-time control.
• Principled deployment of tactile sensors offers a promising mechanism for stable and robust control, but modern approaches often use this data in an ad hoc manner, for instance to guide guarded moves.
• In this work, by exploiting the complementarity structure of contact dynamics, we propose a control framework which can close the loop on rich, tactile sensors.