Picking up dishes based on active groping with multisensory robot hand

In this paper we present a new method for picking up dishes based on active groping. Though a bird´s eye view is commonly used to recognize dishes, this method tends to produce errors in the presence of large occlusion, A multisensory robot hand can be used in a kitchen environment to probe and grasp dishes that are placed close to each other. Though sensing is an effective method, it is difficult to recognize a dish globally by this method because of the locality of measurement. To solve this difficulty, we propose a sensing method to aquire the geometric information about dishes by tracing their surface. We demonstrate that a robot can pick up three types of dishes on the basis of this active groping strategy by conducting an experiment.