Iyad Abdul-baki M. Eng. Sensor-Based Manipulation using a Proximity Sensing Network Marc LeBlanc M. Eng. Dynamic Manipulation Gregory Petryk M. Eng. Control of the pre-contact phase which leads to a successful grasp represents the first step towards autonomous manipulation, and is also of great practical interest. Our three-pronged attack of this problem includes Sensors, Sensor Fusion, and Control.
Size is the most critical constraint, and seems to be the hardest to meet with commercial sensors.
The ones available provide binary object detection, not proximity sensing. The ambient light dependence of IR sensors is eliminated by local signal processing. Finally, the angle dependence is taken care of via a parametric calibration. Although noise reduction is a concern when filtering the data we also wish to perform object localization or object state estimation. We are therefore employing a predictor Extended Kalman Filter to process the raw distance measurement.