Committee: 

Dr. Hutchinson, Advisor 

Dr. Egerstedt, Chair

Dr. Zhao

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to develop cooperative manipulation strategies to facilitate multi-robot and human-robot collaborative tasks in unstructured environments. Several anthropomorphic tasks are cooperative in nature. With an increasing push for introducing robots into our daily lives and to have these robots perform tasks in a cooperative manner with other robots or with humans, more cooperative manipulation strategies need to be investigated. A load distribution strategy, which is subject to the estimate of the external disturbances along the body of one or more of the arms involved in the manipulation process, is presented. This work develops a reaction strategy to external disturbances that is based on transforming the disturbance forces into internal forces on the object through appropriate load distribution on the cooperative robots.