An Electric Field Pretouch system for grasping and co-manipulation

Pretouch sensing is longer range than contact, but shorter range than vision. The hypothesis motivating this work is that closed loop feedback based on short range but non-contact measurements can improve the reliability of manipulation. This paper presents a grasping system that is guided at short range by Electric Field (EF) Pretouch. We describe two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments involves human-to-robot and robot-to-human handoff, including the use of EF Pretouch to detect whether or not a human is also touching an object that the robot is holding, which we call the “co-manipulation state.” In the second set of experiments, the robot picks up standalone objects. We describe a number of techniques that servo the arm and fingers in order to both collect relevant geometrical information, and to actually perform the manipulation task.