Realization of Skill Controllers for Manipulation of Deformable Objects Based on Hybrid Automata

Requirement of handling deformable objects such as leather, paper, and rubber is growing. Since it is very di cult to make a physical model of them, a design of controller to manipulate them becomes one of the signi cant problems in the elds of robotics. On the contrary, if we look at the operation of human worker, the deformable objects seem to be handled naturally and smoothly. This paper presents a new method to design a controller for assembly tasks which involves the manipulation of deformable objects. The proposed method extracts a dynamics that human workers used in executing the demonstrated task, and embed that in an event driven hybrid controller. In our control system, an event observer estimates the change of task state based on a force and visual informations like human workers, and switches the dynamics appropriately according to the task state. The proposed method is applied to a hose insertion task by implementing it on an industrial robot controller.