Tactile Feedback Enabling In-Hand Pivoting and Internal Force Control for Dual-Arm Cooperative Object Carrying

The main purpose of this letter is to demonstrate that smart exploitation of force/tactile feedback can enable successful physical cooperation of two robot manipulators to handle a common object with a high degree of dexterity. The novelty of the letter is that dexterity is provided not only by the degrees of freedom of the robot arms but also by the grasp controller of the sensorized parallel grippers, which allow the robots to manipulate the object either with a tight grasp or with a one-degree-of-freedom rolling contact. The coordinated motion of the robots depends on both the desired motion of the carried object and the control of the internal forces during transportation and in-hand manipulation. The solution exploits only kinematic models of the robots and a dynamic model of the distributed soft contact, which includes both linear force and torsional moment.