Door Manipulation as a Fundamental Skill Realized on Robots With Differential Drive

In the context of assistive mobile service robotics for elderly living in nursing homes, but also for robots realizing autonomous transport in large public buildings in general, a fundamental challenge is to overcome closed doors on their way. We review the state of the art for autonomous door opening by mobile robots and present a modular framework for enabling various robots in this task. The necessary building blocks are introduced, and evaluation results for their application on two different robot platforms are presented. A common property of our platforms, which can be found on many commercial lowcost robots is the use of differential drives. This is limiting the maneuverability and is, therefore, an important constraint for the realization of door manipulation strategies. Furthermore, our method is not dependent on computationally expensive computer vision methods but utilizes the usually available laser-range scanner for localizing and analyzing the door to be manipulated.