CRAFTSMAN: A Framework for Flexible Robotic Tool Usage

TRACLabs has a long-term goal to provide a software toolkit for flexible tool use by robotic manipulators. Our proposed toolkit is a suite of state-of-the-art algorithms focused on extending current pick-and-place planning and control methods to enable robust tool usage by humanoid and other armed robots. Our system provide more intuitive tools for the user of the robotic manipulator, including visualization tools for defining tool use scenarios, including Cartesian tolerances along trajectories and expected forces/torques on the tool tip. This will allow robots to be more capable and more reliable during long-term autonomous tasks, by significantly improving the ability of remote supervisors to command complex tool-usage tasks, by enabling robots to operate safely alongside humans during shared tasks, and by providing a general tool usage framework that works with novel tools and with any robot configuration.