Embracing Safe Contacts with Contact-aware Planning and Control

Abstract-- Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free fashion, to avoid damaging their environment. In a departure from such a traditional approach, this work presents a contactaware controller for reference tracking that maintains interaction forces on the surface of the robot below a safety threshold in the presence of both rigid and soft contacts. A demo video of our results can be seen here: https://youtu.be/2WeYytauhNg We derive a simple yet effective quasi-static dynamics I. INTRODUCTION Furthermore, we introduce Contact-rich tasks require robots to make contact with a contact-aware planning method that finds near-optimal their environment. A good example of such tasks is the trajectories, minimizing the deformation of the environment stowing task in the Amazon warehouses, where elastic bands and preventing our controller from being stuck in local are mounted on cabinets to prevent objects from falling out, minima, when reaching into the cabinet environment in Fig. and human operators establish contact with the elastic bands 1.