Twisting door handles and pulling open doors with a mobile manipulator

The ability of twisting door handles and opening doors is essential for modern robots to work in non-industrial environment. In this paper, two basic problems are addressed: the selection of the inverse kinematics solution and the generation of the path during the process. An algorithm is proposed to find the appropriate solution of the IK problem. In the proposed algorithm, the continuity and periodicity of joint angles are considered and the final solution is selected by minimizing the Euclidean distance from the current state. The path is generated under the kinematics constraints of the door and the limitation of the work space of the manipulator. The experiments are carried out on a real robot with a 6DoF manipulator and a mobile platform. The experimental results showed that the robot system was able to twisting door handles and pull open doors which also proved the correctness of the proposed algorithm and the path generating method.