Robust Deformation Model Approximation for Robotic Cable Manipulation

Cable manipulation is a challenging task for robots. The major challenge is that cables have high degrees of freedom and are easy to deform during manipulation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework SPR-RWLS to manipulate cables, which includes real-time cable tracking and robust local deformation model approximation. For cable tracking, structure preserved registration (SPR) is utilized to robustly estimate the movement of selected points on a cable even in the presence of sensor noise, outliers, and occlusions. Robust weighted least squares (RWLS) is then applied to calculate the local deformation model of the cable under uncertainties. We show that SPR-RWLS enables the dual-arm robots to manipulate cables with different thicknesses and lengths to different desired curvatures in multiple scenarios. We also show that real-time implementation of the proposed method can be simplified by parallel computation.