Robot Opens Doors when Commanded with Laser Pointer

October 23, 2008 · Updated: November 9, 2008 · By Travis Deyle

Researchers at Georgia Tech (labmates of this author) have developed a robot that can robustly open closed doors. The target application for the robot, named El-E ("Ellie"), is assistive tasks related to healthcare in the homes of the disabled. This application demonstrates a set of behaviors that enable a mobile manipulator to reliably open a variety of doors and traverse doorways using force-sensing fingers and a laser range finder.

The work was published at the workshop Robot Manipulation: Intelligence in Human Environments at the 2008 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS 2008). For more detail on the robot and experiments on door openning, see the paper published on this approach. Images and video courtesy of Advait Jain, Georgia Institute of Technology.