The usage of articulated tools for autonomous

robots is still a challenging task. One of the difficulties is to

automatically estimate the tool’s kinematics model. This model

cannot be obtained from a single passive observation, because

some information, such as a rotation axis (hinge), can only be

detected when the tool is being used. Inspired by a baby using

its hands while playing with an articulated toy, we employ a

dual arm robotic setup and propose an interactive manipulation

strategy based on visual-tactile servoing to estimate the tool’s

kinematics model.

In our proposed method, one hand is holding the tool’s

handle stably, and the other arm equipped with tactile finger

flips the movable part of the articulated tool. An innovative

visuo-tactile servoing controller is introduced to implement

the flipping task by integrating the vision and tactile feed-

back in a compact control loop. In order to deal with the

temporary invisibility of the movable part in camera, a data

fusion method which integrates the visual measurement of the

movable part and the fingertip’s motion trajectory is used to

optimally estimate the orientation of the tool’s movable part.

The important tool’s kinematic parameters are estimated by

geometric calculations while the movable part is flipped by the

finger.

We evaluate our method by flipping a pivoting cleaning

head (flap) of a wiper and estimating the wiper’s kinematic

parameters. We demonstrate that the flap of the wiper is flipped

robustly, even the flap is shortly invisible. The orientation of

the flap is tracked well compared to the ground truth data. The

kinematic parameters of the wiper are estimated correctly