Planning and execution of groping behavior for contact sensor based manipulation in an unknown environment

Groping behavior based on contact sensors is necessary for manipulation in an unknown environment. For those situations, it is effective for a robot to accumulate contact information as an environment map, and to plan the motions for executing the safe trial motion. We first propose a method of updating the occupancy grid map of the manipulation region from the contact information by introducing the contact sensor model. Using this map, we propose a method of sampling-based motion planning that enables the execution of the safe trial motion based on the criteria of feasibility and safety. To verify the effectiveness, we show the experimentally obtained results, showing that a real robot plans and executes the manipulation with groping behavior in the occluded environment.