Exploiting the Environment for Object Manipulation

Inspired by biological systems, complex object manipulation can benefit from using the environment to stabilize the involved objects. We show that this holds as well for robotic manipulation by evaluating how the environment can be used to optimize a screwing task. We compared the same manipulation with and without using the environment. We were able to improve the success rate as well as to minimize the stress for the robots joints by stabilizing the object with pressing it against a table and by using the robots impedance mode to reduce the applied forces.