Shallow-Depth Insertion: Peg in Shallow Hole Through Robotic In-Hand Manipulation

This letter presents a novel robotic manipulation technique suitable for shallow-depth insertion, which refers to the assembly of a relatively thin peg-like object into a hole with a shallow depth, as can be seen in a cell phone battery insertion for example. Our technique features dexterous manipulation actions that combine into a complete insertion operation, as also commonly demonstrated by humans performing the battery insertion task. The quasistatic stability of the presented insertion process is shown by constructing the space of force-closure grasps and manipulation primitives to navigate the space by changing the grasps. Our technique is directly applicable to a simple hardware setting with the conventional parallel-jaw gripper installed on an industrial robot arm. A set of experiments performed with our software demonstrates the effectiveness of our technique with a high success rate.