Application of caging manipulation and compliant mechanism for a container case hand-over task

This research aims to realize a container case hand-over task between robots. Although sophisticated cooperative control is essential to avoid destructive internal force in general cooperative transfer task, we propose a geometrical caging strategy which can simplify a hand-over task. To solve a problem of capture region mismatch during caging state transition, the proposed strategy does not utilize additional actuators and sensors but a compliant mechanism whose displacement range can be changed automatically by its configuration. By experiments, it was confirmed that the caging strategy can make the hand-over task drastically easy and robust, and a winch type quasi-compliant mechanism is effective to the problem of capture region mismatch.