Abstract
Capability to manipulate small objects is an important requirement in designing assembly robot. Majority of related studies use one or dual arm robot with gripper or fingered hands for their end effectors. The manipulated objects are usually from common household and not suitable to attend smaller size of object. Therefore, we proposed our robot that consists of a seven-link dual-arm manipulators and three-fingered hands for cooperative tasks involving small objects. As an initial work, we calculate the 6-DOF posture of featureless, small and unobvious color of a hexagonal M10 nut (diameter, 19.6mm). We propose a technique called Confirm-Estimate-Rotate (CER) that employs image processing techniques to integrate with the robot algorithm for a grasping task. Real-time experiment results proved the capability of our method for the manipulation on small objects. It successfully made the multi-link robot change its posture safely to match the target posture in unstructured conditions.
