Visual Servoing Pushing Control of the Soft Robot with Active Pushing Force Regulation.

Journal: Soft robotics
Published Date:

Abstract

Soft robots characterize operational safety due to inherent compliance from their soft mechanism, whereas their mechanism enhances the difficulty in accurate closed-loop control. To explore their applicability in manipulation tasks, in this article, we propose a visual servoing pushing controller considering the effect of contact. The controller is designed to simultaneously complete the positioning and manipulation tasks. To further improve the manipulation performance, an active pushing force regulation method is proposed and integrated into the controller. The proposed control algorithm is validated experimentally. The results show that the controller guarantees the convergence to the image error and meanwhile, it improves the pushing manipulation performance.

Authors

  • Fan Xu
    Department of Public Health, Chengdu Medical College, Sichuan, China.
  • Hesheng Wang
    Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.
  • Zhe Liu
    Interdisciplinary Program in Bioinformatics, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
  • Weidong Chen
    School of Pharmacy, Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, Hefei, 230031, China.
  • Yuxin Wang
    The Key Laboratory of Food Safety Risk Assessment, Ministry of Health, China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment, Beijing 100021, China. Electronic address: wangyx@cfsa.net.cn.