Quasi-static contact-rich manipulation using dynamic movement primitives and haptic potential map

Abstract Robots need a sense of touch to handle objects effectively, and force sensors provide a straightforward way to measure touch or physical contact. However, contact force data are typically sparse and difficult to analyze, as it only appears during contact and is often affected by noise. Therefore, many researchers have consequently relied on vision-based methods for robotic manipulation. However, vision has limitations, such as occlusions that block the camera’s view, making it ineffective or insufficient for dexterous tasks involving contact. This article presents a method for robotic systems operating under quasi-static conditions to perform contact-rich manipulation using only force/torque measurements. First, the interaction forces/torques between the manipulated object and its environment are collected in advance. A potential function is then constructed from the collected force/torque data using Gaussian process regression with derivatives. Next, we develop haptic dynamic movement primitives (Haptic DMPs) to generate robot trajectories. Unlike conventional DMPs, which primarily focus on kinematic aspects, our Haptic DMPs incorporate force-based interactions by integrating the constructed potential energy. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical tasks, including the classical peg-in-hole problem.