Easing Reliance on Collision-free Planning with Contact-aware Control

Understand

We believe that the future of robot motion planning will look very different than how it looks today: instead of complex collision avoidance trajectories with a brittle dependence on sensing and estimation of the environment, motion plans should consist of smooth, simple trajectories and be executed by robots that are not afraid of making contact.

• Here we present a "contact-aware" controller which continues to execute a given trajectory despite unexpected collisions while keeping the contact force stable and small.
• We introduce a quadratic programming (QP) formulation, which minimizes a trajectory-tracking error subject to quasistatic dynamics and contact-force constraints.
• Compared with the classical null-space projection technique, the inequality constraint on contact forces in the proposed QP controller allows for more gentle release when the robot comes out of contact.