A polyhedral friction cone is a set of reaction wrenches that an object can experience whilst in contact with its environment. This polyhedron is a powerful tool to control an object’s motion and interaction with the environment. It can be derived analytically, upon knowledge of object and environment geometries, contact point locations and friction coefficients. We propose to estimate the polyhedral friction cone so that a priori knowledge of these quantities is no longer required. Additionally, we introduce a solution to transform the estimated friction cone to avoid re-estimation while the object moves. We present an analysis of the estimated polyhedral friction cone and demonstrate its application for manipulating an object in simulation and with a real robot.

Robotic manipulation is a very active field of research nowadays; however, pick-and-place operations constitute the majority of today's industrial robotic applications. In order to adopt a robotic solution for an industrial setting, proper evaluation processes should be defined to assess the system's performance. A number of benchmarks have been proposed in the literature focusing mainly on individual components needed to perform the task, like grasping, perception and motion planning; thus, they do not provide enough information on the performance of the entire robotic system. To address this, we propose a benchmarking framework for a pick-and-place task inspired by a use case for picking fruits and vegetables in an industrial setting. To foster reproducible research and comparison of different robotic systems, the benchmarking framework uses surrogate objects with instructions on how to build them, an easy-to-reproduce environment, and guidelines for object placement. The proposed benchmark is applied to evaluate the performance of two variants of a robotic system with different end-effectors.

Social robotic assistants have been widely studied and deployed as telepresence tools or caregivers. Evaluating their design and impact on the people interacting with them is of prime importance. In this research, we evaluate the usability and impact of ARMAR-6, an industrial robotic assistant for maintenance tasks. For this evaluation, we have used a modified System Usability Scale (SUS) to assess the general usability of the robotic system and the Godspeed questionnaire series for the subjective perception of the coworker. We have also recorded the subjects' gaze fixation patterns and analyzed how they differ when working with the robot compared to a human partner.

We investigate the topology of the space of possible pushing behaviour for 2.5D objects of arbitrary outline. We do this by studying the push-stability diagram (PSD) derived by Brost (1985, 1988), which is a generalisation of a result of Mason's. In this paper, we show how to derive a PSD for arbitrarily curved objects, and investigate how changes in the friction between pushing and pushed objects affect the topology of the PSD for any given object. This leads us to include an extra axis on the PSD, resulting in an extended PSD. This representation makes explicit the topological changes in the operation space of possible reorientation behaviours for any given 2.5D object, leading to the possibility of using it in the design of feeders.

For pt. 1 see Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, p.2697-704 (1997). We investigate the topology of the space of possible pushing behaviour for 2.5 D objects of arbitrary outline. We do this by studying the push-stability diagram (PSD) derived by Brost (1985, 1988). We show how to predict some of the effects on the topology of the PSD that arise from varying the position of the centre of mass, making it possible to use this as a control parameter in the design of objects for feeding.