Manipulation Task Primitives for Composing Robot Skills

Abstract

A manipulation task primitive is classified by the relative motion between two (rigid) parts. Only twenty different relative motions are possible and these can be used to guide the identification and development of manipulation task primitives. The goal is to build a richer library of robot capabilities in the manipulation domain. By identifying manipulation task primitives and instantiating solutions to them with available sensors and robot hardware in the form of sensorimotor primitives, we provide a higher-level abstraction for composing solutions to complex manipulation tasks. A key benefit is the ability to re-use costly sensor-based control algorithms for executing these primitives. We discuss the implementation of a few manipulation task primitives using force damping control and active vision feedback. Finally, we decompose a common task into two different skills using the primitives described.