On the visual deformation servoing of compliant objects: Uncalibrated control methods and experiments

Abstract

In this paper, we address the active deformation control of compliant objects by robot manipulators. The control of deformations is needed to automate several important tasks, for example, the manipulation of soft tissues, shaping of food materials, or needle insertion. Note that in many of these applications, the object's deformation properties are not known. To cope with this issue, in this paper we present two new visual servoing approaches to explicitly servo-control elastic deformations. The novelty of our kinematic controllers lies in its uncalibrated behavior; our adaptive methods do not require the prior identification of the object's deformation model and the camera's intrinsic/extrinsic parameters. This feature provides a way to automatically control deformations in a model-free manner. The experimental results that we report validate the feasibility of our controllers.

Multi-Modal Sensing and Robotic Manipulation of Non-Rigid Objects: A Survey

“…Multiple types of deformation features were explored, namely moving a given point to a target location, creating a certain angle, and changing the distance between points. They expanded this work in [98] by presenting an analytical, energy-based solution for active deformation while retaining the adaptive behaviour of their controller and its ability to function in uncalibrated environments. They also developed a solution which does not need to compute the deformation optical flow in real-time by making use of information from offline deformation tests.…”

Dual-arm robotic manipulation of flexible cables

“…Therefore, these methods lack the robustness needed for them to be applied to general cables. More recent works [10], [11], [12] adopted model-free methods to tackle the problem of manipulation of flexible objects. The control action was derived by an on-line deformation models constantly updated by visual feedbacks.…”

On Model Adaptation for Sensorimotor Control of Robots

“…On its most fundamental form, it can trace back its origins to the servomechanism problem [1]. Some common examples are visual servoing [2], tactile/force servoing [3,4], proximity servoing [5], aural servoing [6], deformation/shape servoing [7,8], to name a few cases.…”