Robotic manipulation of flexible objects based on vibration control using force sensors

This paper addresses the issue of flexible object manipulation by robot arms. The main propose is to establish a suitable control system of the robot for performing such the object manipulation tasks. We use a force sensor equipped at the wrist of the robot arm to measure the vibration of the flexible object. A vibration control scheme is designed based on linear feedback of vibration measured by the force sensor. The control system is established just by adding the vibration control scheme into the controller of the wrist joint. To show the feasibility and effectiveness of the vibration measurement method, we carried out some vibration measurement experiments using both the force sensor and a strain gauge separately. The results demonstrate that force sensor can be as effectively as a strain gauge used for vibration measurement of the flexible object. Furthermore, we carried out some vibration control experiments using force sensor signal feedback and manipulation experiments of flexible object. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed manipulating strategy based on vibration control and trajectory tracking.