Control of differential-drive mobile robots for soft object deformation

Abstract

The aim of this work is a control scheme implementation to deform a nonrigid object in which deformation dynamics are modeled by the finite element method. The deformation of a soft object is highly difficult to model because of its non-linearity, time-dependency, and material-response characteristics. Thus, the control implementation for Differential Drive Mobile Robots (DDMR) to deform an elastic object, is a challenge. The proposed steps to solve it are: Position-control designed over DDMR kinematics. Alignment-control applied for DDMRs orientation. The desired shape of the object is achieved using two contact points as the control nodes. A centralized vision algorithm was employed in each stage to obtain positions. To show the usefulness of the proposed scheme, numerical simulation, and real-time implementation were carried out.