Estimation of an object's physical parameter by force sensors of a dual-arm robot

We are developing a Nursing-Care Robot in order to reduce the load in physical nursing care. The concept of this robot is to promote the cared persons by the robot to activate their own motion ability as long as possible. This may lead to the improvement of the cared person's movement volition and movement abilities. In order to realize safe and human friendly robot care tasks, full body manipulation is an important technology, for which it is necessary to estimate the subject's center of gravity from the contact positions and forces with the robot's two arms. In this paper, we estimate the center of gravity of object based on the contact point and the contact force estimated by force sensor on both robot arms. The position of gravity center is important to realize care tasks stably. We performed experiments and simulations for the single point contact and dual points contact cases using a cylindrical object. As a result, it is found that although some errors were recognized in the experiments compared with the simulations, the relations between the contact positions and such errors were observed. Such experimental error mainly comes from the difference of shape between the real robot and the model of the robot in simulation. As the future work, we have to improve the robot model so as to get better estimated information.