Geometry-Based Two-Contact Inverse Kinematic Solution for Whole Arm Manipulation

Whole-arm manipulation (WAM) is often used to manipulate large and bulky objects. Contact point-based methods for generating the robot configurations for WAM mostly search for suitable contact points and configurations simultaneously. However, in order to learn good contact points, or allow an operator to select them, inverse kinematics (IK) solvers are needed which take such points along with a surface normal into account. Therefore, we propose a geometry-based IK method for WAM generate robot configurations in contact with two specific points. The method is compared against two other methods, one numerical method and a commercial IK solver. We show our method to be the fastest.