An approach to realistic physical simulation of digitally captured deformable linear objects

Deformable Linear Object manipulation stands as an important aspect of robot operation, with wide applications in industrial and daily life. However, it is also a difficult task to perform; the problems we encounter in Deformable Linear Object manipulation are related to the object's intrinsic physical characteristics that require complex physical prediction in order to properly interact with them, like its flexibility or elasticity. One of the approaches available to researchers for obtaining manipulation plans consists in recreating the object in a virtual environment and simulating the interactions between the robot and the object, predicting its behavior using physics models. However, in order to accurately simulate the object, we need to capture the object's physical properties, something often done manually by an expert. In this paper, we present a system that automatically calculates the physical parametrization of Deformable Linear Objects for subsequent uses in simulation processes. The system uses photographs of the object behavior after certain interactions as input reference and generates a virtual counterpart of said object ready to be used in a virtual environment. We also performed an experiment with the goal of verifying the accuracy of our system and tested it in conjunction of a manipulation planer in order to assess its usefulness.