Teaching Method for Robot’s Gripper Posture with a Laser Sensor on a Pan-tilt Actuator: A Method for Specifying Posture Feature Curves and Posture Feature Point *

Recently a lot of robots have been developed for supporting our daily life or patient care. In order to instruct such a support robot that can work in such cluttered environments, we have conventionally developed an intuitive robot teaching interface using a Time-of-Flight laser sensor on a pan-tilt actuator driven by a user. This interface enables us to control the direction of the laser spot to “click” a real object and instruct a robot to manipulate it by drag-and-drop operation throughout a PC world and a real world. In our conventional system, however, the success rates of grasping object was very low because only the position of the object can be taught, not the orientation of the object. To cope with the problem, in this paper we propose a system to easily grasp an object of arbitrary posture by measuring the locus of the laser spot using our real world click system. Some grasping experiments on various daily objects showed the effectiveness of the proposed method.