Safe manipulation in unknown, crowded environments via sensor-based interleaving planner: interleaving software and sensitive skin hardware

摘要

As various robots are anticipated to coexist with humans in the near future, safe manipulation in unknown, cluttered environments becomes an important issue. Manipulation in an unknown environment, however, has been proven to be NP-Hard and the risk of unexpected human-robot collision hampers the dawning of the era of human-robot coexistence. We propose a non-contactbased sensitive skin as a means to provide safe manipulation hardware and interleaving planning between the workspace and the configuration space as software to solve manipulation problems in unknown, crowded environments. Novelty of the paper resides in demonstration of real time and yet complete path planning in an uncertain and crowded environment. To that end, we introduce the framework of the sensor-based interleaving planner (SBIP) whereby search completeness and safe manipulation are both guaranteed in cluttered environments. We study an interleaving mechanism between sensation in aworkspace and execution in the corresponding configuration space for real-time planning in uncertain environments, thus the name interleaving planner implies.