Before the Tipping Point: Force-Guided Active Perception for Shape-Agnostic Estimation of 3D Centers of Mass

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Estimating the 3D center of mass of unknown objects is challenging when grasping is infeasible, geometry is irregular, or mass distribution is uneven. We present a force-based method that estimates CoM height and mass from a single sub-critical tipping experiment by a robot manipulator. The robot applies a quasistatic elevated push and retract motion, using force-angle measurements recorded during tipping to identify parameters from the object trajectory. Our proposed push-retract cycle mitigates frictional bias, enabling generalized fitting. We experimentally validate our method using a robot manipulator with a six-axis force torque sensor on varying types of objects without prior shape information and without specific models. We also propose a method to prevent toppling, keeping the object in a sub-critical tipping regime by leveraging a safety margin. In experimental studies, our method recovers mass, CoM height, and toppling angle with relative errors below 5.0 percent across all unknown objects. This work demonstrates reliable 3D inertial parameter estimation under proper safety thresholds in tipping. Our proposed method informs and enables reliable non-prehensile manipulation and robotic grasping of challenging objects that were previously infeasible.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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