Adaptive Tool-Use Strategies for Anthropomorphic Service Robots

Tool-use is one of the most complex object manipulation abilities of humans and robots. In this paper, we present strategies for implementing tool-use with anthropomorphic service robots. Based on the observation that human tools are specifically designed for the human body, we augment tools with handles that adapt the tool to the specifics of our robot. We develop methods for perceiving the tools and their end-effectors in RGB-D images. We also describe our control approaches used in our tool-use examples. We demonstrate tool-use by our service robot publicly at RoboCup@Home competitions, and report on the lessons learned through implementing such complex manipulation skills for our robot.