Abstract
In the case of object manipulation by a humanoid robot, it is important to deal with object-robot-environment contact states both to avoid falling down and achieve objective manipulations. We propose a method to describe and execute uniformly various object manipulations by a humanoid robot. We focus on the contact states as description of manipulation and define manipulation phases according to the contact states. In execution of motion, humanoid's controller obtains information for manipulation from force and contact point sensing, estimates changes of contact states, autonomously switches manipulation phases, and substantiate force-based controller. We evaluated our proposed method through experiments in which a humanoid robot manipulates four objects without information about object's mass and necessary operational force.
