Micro well-plates are commonly used apparatus in chemical and biological
experiments that are a few centimeters in thickness with wells in them. The
task we aim to solve is to place (insert) them onto a well-plate holder with
grooves a few millimeters in height. Our insertion task has the following
facets: 1) There is uncertainty in the detection of the position and pose of
the well-plate and well-plate holder, 2) the accuracy required is in the order
of millimeter to sub-millimeter, 3) the well-plate holder is not fastened, and
moves with external force, 4) the groove is shallow, and 5) the width of the
groove is small. Addressing these challenges, we developed a) an adaptive
finger gripper with accurate detection of finger position (for (1)), b) grasped
object pose estimation using tactile sensors (for (1)), c) a method to insert
the well-plate into the target holder by sliding the well-plate while
maintaining contact with the edge of the holder (for (2-4)), and d) estimating
the orientation of the edge and aligning the well-plate so that the holder does
not move when maintaining contact with the edge (for (5)). We show a
significantly high success rate on the insertion task of the well-plate, even
though under added noise.
An accompanying video is available at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UxyJ3XIxqXPnHcpfw-PYs5T5oYQxoc6i/view?usp=sharingComment: 7 pages, 5 figure