An Experiment in the Use of Manipulation Primitives and Tactile Perception for Reactive Grasping

Uncertainty is one of the main problems that have to deal robot manipulation systems in service environments. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to program manipulation actions, that makes use of a priori defined manipulation primitives and sensory feedback to face uncertainty in the execution. It also takes into account the limitation of the robot gripper and the reactive execution of such actions. We describe the role of different sensory data in such scheme. Finally, a practical implementation of a manipulation primitive is presented which follows the principles of the theoretical framework. The task is the is the extraction of books from a bookshelf, with the UJI service robot.