Wang, S., Leonetti, M. and Dogar, M. orcid.org/0000-0002-6896-5461 (2025) Goal-Conditioned Model Simplification for 1-D and 2-D Deformable Object Manipulation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics. ISSN 1552-3098
Abstract
Motion planning for deformable object manipulation has been a challenge for a long time in robotics due to its high computational cost. In this work, we propose to mitigate this cost by limiting the number of picking points on a deformable object within the action space and simplifying the dynamics model. We do this first by identifying a minimal geometric model that closely approximates the original model at the goal state; specifically, we implement this general approach for 1-D linear deformable objects (e.g., ropes) using a piece-wise line-fitted model, and for 2-D surface deformable objects (e.g., cloth) using a mesh-simplified model. Then a small number of key particles are extracted as the pickable points in the action space which are sufficient to represent and reach the given goal. Additionally, a simplified dynamics model is constructed based on the simplified geometric model, containing much fewer particles and thus being much faster to simulate than the original dynamics model, albeit with some loss of precision. We further refine this model iteratively by adding more details from the actually achieved final state of the original model until a satisfactory trajectory is generated. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted on a set of representative tasks for ropes and cloth, which show a significant decrease in time cost while achieving similar or better trajectory costs. Finally, we establish a closed-loop system of perception, planning, and control with a real robot for cloth folding, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author produced version of an article published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Deformable object manipulation, motion planning, action space reduction, model simplification |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Computing (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) EP/V052659/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 29 May 2025 10:59 |
Last Modified: | 17 Jun 2025 12:42 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | IEEE |
Identification Number: | 10.1109/TRO.2025.3577052 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:227194 |