Indirect simultaneous positioning operations of extensionally deformable objects

Abstract

A novel control method for the indirect simultaneous positioning operation of soft deformable objects will be proposed. In some operations, multiple points on a deformable object should be positioned to desired regions simultaneously. In addition, these positioned points often cannot be operated directly and we have to perform these operations indirectly by controlling other points. We call these operations indirect simultaneous positioning operations. First, a simplified physical model of deformable textile fabrics is developed for their positioning operations. Second, the indirect simultaneous positioning operations are formulated using the proposed model. Based on the linearized model of the deformable objects, we will propose a novel control method for the indirect simultaneous positioning operations with visual sensors. In this method, positioned points can be guided to the desired locations by controlling the positions of operation points. It should be noted that our control method works well even if exact physical properties of fabrics cannot be given. Experimental results will show the validity of our proposed method. In addition, a condition to examine whether a given operation is feasible or not will be considered based on the linearized model.