Survey on multi-robot manipulation of deformable objects

Abstract

Autonomous manipulation of deformable objects is a research topic of increasing interest due to the variety of current processes and applications that include this type of tasks. It is a complex problem that involves aspects such as modeling, control, perception, planning, grasping, estimation, etc. A single robot may be unable to perform the manipulation when the deformable object is too big, too heavy or difficult to grasp. Then, using multiple robots working together naturally arises as a solution to perform coordinately the manipulation task. In this paper, we contribute a survey of relevant state-of-the-art approaches concerning manipulation of deformable objects by multiple robots, which includes a specific classification with different criteria and a subsequent analysis of the leading methods, the main challenges and the future research directions.