Maneuver and formation control of a pair of soft pneumatic bending fingers by a cooperative strategy for planar in-hand object manipulation

Abstract

In this paper, we seek performing dynamic in-hand object manipulation with two-segmented soft fingers in 2-D plane. Thereby, after the dynamic behavior of the soft fingers was defined, we evaluate the influence of external tip force on the finger. It is shown that the tip position error, under the effect of tip force, can be represented by uncertainties in kinematic parameters of the finger. As a result, we design a sliding-adaptive controller with compensation of kinematic uncertainties to fulfill our expectation that is controlling the tip position of the finger in vertical plane while interacting with the environment. Finally, inspired by the way that human fingers manipulate an object, a cooperative control system for manipulation is proposed which incorporates the states and tip positions of the fingers in its feedback signal. Combination of this controller with the adaptive control system yields more promising results than does the PID controller. In order to evaluate performance of the proposed controller, Simulation results for manipulation of a cubic rigid object are demonstrated.