Motion Planning for Dynamic Three-Dimensional Manipulation for Unknown Flexible Linear Object

Generally, deformable objects have large and nonlinear deformations. Because of these characteristics, recognition and estimation of their movement are difficult. Many studies have been conducted aimed at manipulating deformable objects at will. However, they have been focused on situations wherein a rope’s properties are already known from prior experiments. In our previous work, we proposed a motion planning algorithm to manipulate unknown ropes using a robot arm. Our approach considered three steps: motion generation, manipulation, and parameter estimation. By repeating these three steps, a parameterized flexible linear object model that can express the actual rope movements was estimated, and manipulation was realized. However, our previous work was limited to 2D space manipulation. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed method to address casting manipulation in a 3D space. Casting manipulation involves targeting the flexible linear object tips at the desired object. While our previous studies focused solely on two-dimensional manipulation, this work examines the applicability of the same approach in 3D space. Moreover, 3D manipulation using an unknown flexible linear object has never been reported for dynamic manipulation with flexible linear objects. In this work, we show that our proposed method can be used for 3D manipulation.