Manipulation Polices for Screw Fastening Task Using the Designed Rotating Tool

This work presents the manipulation policies for a robot to use a designed rotating tool to conduct screw fastening tasks. The tool converts the parallel motion of robotic grippers into continuous rotation, thus, reduces the difficulties of performing screwing motion. However, using the tool to complete a whole screw fastening task consisting of continuous screwing, firmly tightening, and detaching the tool from a screw head is a challenging work. To solve the problem, we formulate the screwing process as a decision problem and develop the policy-selection algorithm, which considers the actions of both the robotic gripper and robot arm. The experiments validate that with the proposed methods, a robot can use the tool to complete a screw fastening task successfully.