Force Feedback for Reliable Robotic Door Opening

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Abstract

Opening a door is still a hard problem in robotics.  Many robotic manipulators use open-loop position control to open doors, which reduces reusability and reliability in the face of slight differences or sensor errors.  Many others use force feedback or impedance control but skip past the problem of grabbing the handle, which could lead to failures due to sensor errors.  This research assumes that perception is faulty, and uses joint-level force feedback to probe the location of the door and its handle before attempting to open it.  The resulting control strategy is at least 33% faster than the open-loop control system it replaces, and had an 83% success rate during testing in place of the previous method's 60% success rate.