2023/12/14 by Kevin Tracy, Zachary Manchester, Tracy, Kevin +11 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Adhesion, Friction, and Surface Interactions #Dynamics and Control of Mechanical Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.09190
openalex publication_date 2023/12/14 · openalex created_date 2023/12/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Contact-rich manipulation tasks with stiff frictional elements like connector insertion are difficult to model with rigid-body simulators. In this work, we propose a new approach for modeling these environments by learning a quasi-static contact force model instead of a full simulator. Using a feature vector that contains information about the configuration and control, we find a linear mapping adequately captures the relationship between this feature vector and the sensed contact forces. A novel Linear Model Learning (LML) algorithm is used to solve for the globally optimal mapping in real time without any matrix inversions, resulting in an algorithm that runs in nearly constant time on a GPU as the model size increases. We validate the proposed approach for connector insertion both in simulation and hardware experiments, where the learned model is combined with an optimization-based controller to achieve smooth insertions in the presence of misalignments and uncertainty. Our website featuring videos, code, and more materials is available at https://model-based-plugging.github.io/.