A Two-Arm Exploratory System for Identifying Moving and Removable Parts

When working in an unstructurcd environment, a robot has partial or no a priori knowledge of the environment. The purpose of exploratory robotics is to provide robots with the ability to learn and automatically construct models of the environment by exploring and interacting with the environment. This paper describes a two-arm exploratory system whose purpose is to identify movable and removable parts of an object, and the mobility of the parts. The system is implemented by integrating RCI (Robot Control Interface) with Timix (a real-time kernel). The identification is accomplished through exp1oratory procedures which are generated from a numbcr of robust motion primitives.