Modeling and motion planning for handling furniture by a mobile manipulator

This paper introduces a planning method for handling furniture which exists in real world. We propose a method which is easily expandable its handle able furniture such as closet, shelf and so on. If the robot can handle such furniture autonomously, it is expected that multiple daily tasks, for example, storing a small object in a drawer, can be achieved by the robot. Because perplexing processes is needed to give the knowledge of furniture handling to the robot manually, we propose direct teaching based approach which can easily give not only how to handle the furniture but also an appearance and 3D shape of it. Combining general knowledge given in advance and manipulation procedure instructed by human directly, the robot acquires how to manipulate the storing places. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated by experiments.