Human-Inspired Anticipatory Motion Planning for Robotic Manipulators in Contact Tasks

In this work, we present a novel solution aimed at improving robotic manipulators' performance in contact tasks. Inspired by the human motor control system, which relies on a feedforward mechanism to anticipate and plan movements based on the physical properties of the target environment, our approach plans the robot's motion during the reaching phase, prior to contact. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments using the KUKA youBot arm in two distinct environments, represented by soft and hard materials. Results showed that the robot exhibited compliant behavior, with an average reduction of 71% in overshoot, 60% in rise-time, and 68% steady-state error of the force control response during contact.