Opening a door with a redundant impedance controlled robot

Opening a door with a robotic manipulator equipped with a gripper, is a vital problem in service robotics research. This paper presents an approach to opening a cabinet door with an impedance controlled 7-DOF redundant manipulator. A control system is developed that considers redundancy in order to maximise the manipulation capabilities of the manipulator whilst avoiding reaching the joints limits. The control strategy is based on automatically estimating the kinematic parameters of the door. All conducted experiments were based on the assumption that the manipulator pulls a handle and opens a door using a single finger.