Realization of skill controllers for manipulation of deformable objects based on hybrid automata

The requirement of handling deformable objects such as leather, paper and rubber is growing. Since it is very difficult to make a physical model of them, the design of a controller to manipulate them becomes one of the significant problems in the field of robotics. If we look at the operation of a human worker, the deformable objects seem to be handled naturally and smoothly. The paper presents a method to design a controller for assembly tasks which involves the manipulation of deformable objects. The proposed method extracts the dynamics that human workers used in executing the demonstrated task, and embeds that in an event driven hybrid controller. In our control system, an event observer estimates the change of task state based on force and visual information 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 in an industrial robot controller.