Coordination of visual and tactile sensors for pushing operation using multiple autonomous arms

When working in real situations, intelligent robots should be able to fuse sensory information from different channels to come by knowledge about objects to be operated on. We present a method of integrating visual and tactile sensors for pushing an object on a slanted plane by using multiple autonomous arms. In the implementation, each robot arm has its own force/torque (F/T) sensor and shares a CCD camera with the other ones. A sensor selection and integration algorithm is designed to fuse information obtained from such sensors so that each arm can determine its own actions without communication. The validity of the proposed method is examined in experiments of the pushing operation using two arms.