Control of Elastic Robot Arm by Feedback of Shape Information with High-speed Vision

Abstract

Many researches on lightweight robot link have been carried out. Lightweight robot arms will improve the energy consumption, maintainability, and safety. Such lightweight arms are likely to be flexible, so the control methods of these arms have been studied. On the other hand, using this flexible characteristic, it is pointed out that flexible arm can realize the tasks that cannot be done by conventional solid arms, when the arm is operated rapidly and large deformation on the arm is occurred. Using flexible arms, operations with high degrees of freedom can be achieved since they can maintain their shape or posture in stopping, and can change their shapes in moving. In this research, we focused on the manipulation method which uses the deformation of the flexible arm. We studied the system that is needed for controlling the deformation of flexible arms, and the method of extracting the deformation of the flexible arm from its entire shape. We conduct some experiments of oscillation suppression as an example of the controlling task. With the system constructed in this paper, it is confirmed that deformation of the flexible arm can be captured and that the controlling the flexible arm can be done.