Adaptive Contact Point Estimation for Autonomous Tool Manipulation

Autonomous grasping and manipulation of toolsenables robots to perform a large variety of tasks in unstructuredenvironments such as households. Many commonhousehold tasks involve controlling the motion of the tip of a toolwhile it is in contact with another object. Thus, for these types oftasks the robot requires knowledge of the location of the contactpoint while it is executing the task in order to accomplish themanipulation objective. In this work we propose an integraladaptive control law that uses force/torque measurements toestimate online the location of the contact point between thetool manipulated by the robot and the surface which the tooltouches