An approach for the bimanual manipulation of a deformable linear object using a dual-arm industrial robot: cable routing use case

Abstract

The automation of processes that handle deformable materials is considered to be a complicated task. Due to their properties, these materials require specialised solutions for their manipulation, using robotic systems and mostly, using specifically developed hardware which limits its use for different deformable objects. To solve this issue, this paper presents an approach for bimanually manipulating Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) using a dual-arm industrial robot. This approach aims at providing an automatic, generic, and easily reconfigurable solution and is implemented for routing cables in a human-centric platform. The approach consists of a cyber-physical system (CPS) composed by commercial hardware: a robot equipped with two parallel grippers, and a reconfigurable Robot Operating System (ROS) software. In more details, the developed software extracts information about the process, such as the routing path, keypoints of the workstation setup and objects dimensions. Then, it uses the extracted information to generate suitable bimanual trajectories for the robot. Finally, the approach has been tested for three different routine paths.