Robotic Exploration of Surfaces With a Compliant Wrist Sensor

This paper presents some results of an ongoing research project to investigate the components and modules that are necessary to equip a robot with exploratory capabilities. Of particular interest is the recovery of certain material properties from a surface, given minimal a priori information, with the intent to use this information to enable a robot to stand and walk stably on a surface that is unknown and unconstrained. To this end, exploratory procedures (ep's) have been designed and implemented to recover penetrability, material hardness and surface roughness by exploring the surface using a compliant wrist sensor. A six degree-offreedom compliant wrist sensor, which combines passive compliance and active sensing, has been developed to provide the necessary flexibility for force and contact control, as well as to provide accurate position control. This paper describes the compliant wrist and sensing mechanism design along with a hybrid control algorithm that utilizes the sensed information from the wrist to adjust the apparent stiffness of the endeffector as desired. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-90-92. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/354 Robotic Exploration Of Surfaces With A Compliant Wrist Sensor MS-CIS-90-92 GRASP LAB 244 Pramath R. Sinha Yangsheng Xu Ruzena Bajcsy Richard P. Paul Department of Computer and Information Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389