Skill-based vibration suppression in manipulation of deformable linear objects

Researches on robotic manipulation mainly focus on rigid objects. Whereas, manipulating deformable linear objects (DLOs) such as hoses, wires, cables is common in daily life and many domains such as manufacture, medical surgery and so on. The DLOs are more challengeable to handle, as the uncertainty results from oscillation at the end of DLOs may cause failure in the operation. During manipulating DLOs, especially moving them rapidly, the dynamic characteristics can not be neglected. In this paper, based on the dynamic model of DLOs, we illustrate a skill-based manipulating strategy for eliminating the vibration at the end of DLOs. The method is position-based and inspired from human manipulation skills. From our life experience, when people manipulate DLOs by hand, the oscillation will be significantly reduced if we suddenly lift it up with a certain acceleration. Based on the idea and dynamic model of DLOs, the control strategy by using fuzzy and PI controller is illustrated. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is confirmed by numerical simulation results. The simulation results show that the proposed method can damp the vibration effectively.