Wall cutting strategy for circular hole using humanoid robot

This paper explains the strategy of cutting a circular hole in a wall and removing the cut piece with a humanoid robot. The two difficult aspects of this task are how the robot turns on the drill and how the wall is cut following the desired trajectory while the robot avoids the torque limit of its joints. This is because the robot we used, THORMANG, especially has low payload and large gripper. Therefore, we proposed the following two approaches. First, we devised a special device on the robot gripper to turn on the drill immediately when the robot grasps the drill. Secondly, only one high-powered shoulder joint, rather than all the arm joints, is used to avoid the torque limits on some of the arm joints and cut a circular hole efficiently. These approaches were very effective on our robot THORMANG but they can also be applied to other humanoid robots. We demonstrated our strategy at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals by succeeding to cut a hole in a wall.