Bimanual Continuous Steering Wheel Turning by a Dual-Arm Robot

In previous research on robot driving, most steering wheel turning skills are implemented with a single arm. This article introduces a model-based method for bimanual steering wheel turning, enabling a “seated” dual-arm robot to perform this manipulation without precise knowledge of the steering wheel's location and orientation. In this method, the dual-arm robot and the steering wheel are modeled as a system by building contact constraints in a quadratic program (QP) controller. Then, the dual-arm coordinated motion can be induced automatically rather than planned explicitly. In addition, the proposed method includes an adaptation scheme. The scheme can estimate and reduce the discrepancies between reality and the model according to the executed end-effector trajectories. With its help, the dual-arm robot effectively minimizes internal forces and achieves fast turning. The proposed method is validated through experiments on a real vehicle and a real dual-arm robotic platform.