Pulling open novel doors and drawers with equilibrium point control

A large variety of doors and drawers can be found within human environments. Humans regularly operate these mechanisms without difficulty, even if they have not previously interacted with a particular door or drawer. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that equilibrium point control can enable a humanoid robot to pull open a variety of doors and drawers without detailed prior models, and infer their kinematics in the process. Our implementation uses a 7 DoF anthropomorphic arm with series elastic actuators (SEAs) at each joint, a hook as an end effector, and low mechanical impedance. For our control scheme, each SEA applies a gravity compensating torque plus a torque from a simulated, torsional, viscoelastic spring. Each virtual spring has constant stiffness and damping, and a variable equilibrium angle. These equilibrium angles form a joint space equilibrium point (JEP), which has a corresponding Cartesian space equilibrium point (CEP) for the arm's end effector. We present two controllers that generate a CEP at each time step (ca. 100 ms) and use inverse kinematics to command the arm with the corresponding JEP. One controller produces a linear CEP trajectory and the other alters its CEP trajectory based on real-time estimates of the mechanism's kinematics. We also present results from empirical evaluations of their performance (108 trials). In these trials, both controllers were robust with respect to variations in the mechanism, the pose of the base, the stiffness of the arm, and the way the handle was hooked. We also tested the more successful controller with 12 distinct mechanisms. In these tests, it was able to open 11 of the 12 mechanisms in a single trial, and successfully categorized the 11 mechanisms as having a rotary or prismatic joint, and opening to the right or left. Additionally, in the 7 out of 8 trials with rotary joints, the robot accurately estimated the location of the axis of rotation.