Object gripping and lifting based on plane detection by tracked mobile robot with two manipulators

A tracked mobile robot with multiple robotic arms is useful for working in a disaster area because it can perform handling tasks such as object gripping and carrying by the use of the arms. To reduce burden of remote control on an operator for such tasks, this study presents a method for detecting gripping positions of an object for the two arms using an RGB-D sensor. The method is based on plane detection of a polyhedron object. Plane information of an object is detected by the depth sensor, and two planes having opposing normal vectors are selected as a set of candidate for gripping planes. Joint angles of both arms to grip the planes are calculated with position and posture of the robot using inverse kinematics. If the robot can grip the planes by both arms, they are selected as the gripping planes, then the robot moves to the obtained gripping position and performs gripping and lifting up the object. Several experimental results for the tracked mobile robot with two manipulators developed by the authors verified the validity of this method.