Robust, Cooperative and Intelligent Dexterous Manipulation in Complex Environments

Over the past decades, increasing attention has been paid to robotic dexterous manipulation for a broad range of applications, such as smart factories in manufacturing, military applications, warehouses, surgery and prosthetics, and health care services. Despite the significant progress of robotics, artificial intelligence and computing technologies, the ability of robots to perform general tasks is still far from that of human beings. The proposed work addresses one of the recognized major challenges in robotics and automation. The results of the proposed research will enable more reliable, adaptable, and efficient operation of robotic systems interacting with humans. The research in cooperative manipulation will help the industry to offer operating convenience and increase economic efficiency as well as benefit to people requiring medical interventions and physical assistance. The short term objectives are to achieve: 1) tactile and compliant manipulation of a single arm to improve the dexterity for manipulators equipped with grasping hands and tactile sensing for manufacturing and health care applications; 2) dexterous cooperative robotic manipulation for tasks in a complex environment where bimanual and multiple robotic manipulations are required, such as screwing, removal of hazardous materials, surgery, and assembly tasks; 3) intelligent human-robot dexterous co-manipulation to improve human safety, productivity, and facilitate human-guided behavior learning. The following issues will be studied with extensive experimental studies. Robotic hands will be integrated with 7-DOF manipulators to improve the manipulability and the dexterity. Compliant human-like manipulations with force control, new coordination control for free motion, novel adaptive admittance control when interacting with the environment, and comparisons with learning-based approach will be developed. Cooperative manipulation between multiple manipulators with collision avoidance in a complex environment, force/motion coordination schemes on cooperative tasks will be developed, optimized and evaluated with proper performance indices. A human-machine interface to anticipate the objective of the human partner for human-robot collaboration tasks will be developed. Effective human-robot co-manipulation approaches, multi-modal, stable and robust human-robot dexterous manipulation and new reinforcement learning approach for human-robot co-manipulation in complex environments will be proposed. The research will provide an interdisciplinary training environment to highly qualified personnel with more hands-on ability to contribute to innovation in the key technological areas in robotics, control, mechatronics, signal processing and AI. Developing the high-technology automation and robotic industry has the potential to contribute significantly to the Canadian economy and the outcomes of this research will enhance Canada's profile in industry automation and intelligent systems.