Rope Structure Recognition for Manipulation Using Topological Model and Knot Invariant

Abstract

There are many deformable objects such as papers, clothes, and ropes in life space of a person. Robots need skills to manipulate deformable objects, in order to take active parts in such space. However, it is difficult for robots to manipulate deformable objects well and possibility of failure to operate deformable objects cannot be denied. Therefore theoretical framework of error recovery for deformable object manipulation is required. For error recovery system, it is necessary to abstract profitable data from deformable objects, which are hyper degrees of freedom structures. Thus in this paper, we propose the description method of the condition of rope using the topological model and knot theory. And, we also propose the recognition method to obtain the structure of rope from visual information when a robot manipulates a rope. The effectiveness of method is confirmed by the experiment.