Manipulation

操作Essential

A robot using its hand or a tool to contact an object and change its position, pose, or state.

Manipulation means a robot using an arm, gripper, or dexterous hand to contact an object and change its position, orientation, or state — grasping, placing, opening a drawer, pouring water, folding clothes. Along with locomotion, it's one of embodied AI's two main capability areas: locomotion is about how the body moves, manipulation is about how the hands do work. MIT professor Russ Tedrake, in his course notes “Robotic Manipulation: Perception, Planning, and Control,” points out that manipulation is far more than pick-and-place: a hand has to constantly make and break contact, apply force, and switch rapidly between “sticking” and “sliding” friction states, which is already hard purely as a dynamics-and-control problem. Everyday tasks people find mundane — loading a dishwasher, folding laundry — remain extremely challenging for robots and sit at the frontier of robotics research. Common sub-areas include dexterous manipulation, bimanual manipulation, contact-rich manipulation, and manipulating deformable objects.

ExampleHaving a bimanual robot take dishes out of a dishwasher one at a time and put them away in a cabinet is a long-horizon manipulation task made up of many grasps and placements.

Also called: Robotic Manipulation
Related: Grasping · Dexterous Manipulation · Bimanual Manipulation · Contact-rich Manipulation · Mobile Manipulation · Locomotion
Sources: Russ Tedrake, Robotic Manipulation (MIT course notes), Ch.1 Introduction