Shared Control for Cable Routing with Tactile Sensing

Abstract

Multi-stage deformable linear object manipulation, such as cable routing, is the common and necessary part of human life and industry. However, autonomous robots still lack the dexterity and generalization required for these complex tasks. Direct teleoperation is an alternative approach, but the absence of reliable force and haptic feedback methods undermines its robustness and efficiency. This paper proposes a shared control method based on tactile sensing to address a multi-stage, contact-rich cable routing task. The proposed method allows human and robotic autonomy to share control of the robot platform. An action primitive vocabulary is constructed, incorporating adaptive authority allocation between human and autonomy, to generate motions for specific task stages. These allocations modulate the control weights of human and autonomy in accordance with the requirements of task stages. The method selects primitives from this vocabulary based on the tactile data and human intention. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through a task involving straightening a cable and slotting it into a clip. We compare its performance with alternative methods and present that our method has a higher success rate and takes less time than direct teleoperation.