Consensus Driven Dynamical Systems Control for Dual-Arm Handover
Debojit Das, Siddhi Jain, Rajesh Kumar, Harish Palanthandalam-Madapusi
AI summary
Problem
Traditional robotic handover strategies rely on segmented pipelines or rigid pre-planned trajectories that desynchronize under dynamic obstacles, causing idle hovering and collisions. The paper addresses how to achieve real-time, phase-locked spatial and temporal coordination between two manipulators during object transfer despite path deviations.
Approach
The authors replace segmented handover stages with a unified dynamical systems controller that uses a shared consensus clock to couple translational and rotational progress variables. This dynamically adjusts each arm’s velocity to maintain synchronization even when obstacle avoidance modulates their paths.
Key results
- Unified dynamical systems framework replacing segmented handover pipelines with a single continuous formulation.
- Quaternion-based orientation coupling extended to full 6-DoF end-effector synchronization across spatially separated manipulators.
- Single consensus clock guaranteeing phase-locked convergence of position and orientation under disturbances and obstacle-induced detours.
- Experimental validation on independent 6-DoF manipulators and an upper-torso dual-arm platform achieving 100% success rate with coupling versus 10% without.
Why it matters
Enables reliable, human-like bimanual cooperation for industrial automation, warehouse logistics, and humanoid robotics by eliminating idle phases and ensuring robust real-time coordination.
Abstract
Robot bimanual handovers (transferring an object between two arms) require careful coordination of timing, motion, and obstacle avoidance. Efficient, human-like object transfer between cooperating robots demands both spatial and tight temporal coordination. Existing approaches treat these requirements in isolation or rely on pre-computed trajectories that fail when obstacles/disturbances appear, degrading perfor- mance, segmented behavior, and introducing desynchronization. This paper introduces a dynamical systems framework that transitions each arm from independent asynchronous motion to coupled synchronous coordination. In this context, coupling denotes both the spatial coordination of the arms and their temporal synchronization. The framework’s coordination and synchrony are robust to obstacles/disturbances along its path. Experiments on an upper torso dual-arm platform and on tradi- tional manipulators show seamless handovers that remain stable despite obstructions, always preserving spatial coordination and temporal synchrony. Supplementary videos and source code are available at: https://debojit-d.github.io/consens us-handover/