Robust Manipulation of Deformable Objects Using Model Based Technique

Manipulation of deformable objects will be discussed. Manipulation of deformable objects is de ned as controlling deformation of objects as well as their positions and orientations. The manipulation is a fundamental and important task in many industrial elds. In fact, there exist many operations of deformable objects such as textile fabrics, rubber parts, paper sheets, strings, and foods. In order to realize the manipulation of deformable objects by mechanical systems, an object model is indispensable. It is, however, diÆcult to build exact model of the deformable objects due to their strong nonlinearity such as friction, hysteresis and parameter variations. Thus, such operations strongly depend on skilled human workers. To overcome this problem, we will propose a robust control strategy using a model based technique. We will build a coarse model of an object for the manipulation and will develop a control method robust to the discrepancy between the object and its model. Experimental results will show the robustness of the proposed method.