Challenges and Outlook in Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances and challenges in robotic manipulation of deformable objects, emphasizing the complexity and need for breakthroughs across hardware, sensing, modeling, planning, and control to enable autonomous manipulation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current progress, identifies key challenges, and discusses future research directions in deformable object manipulation in robotics.

Findings

Deformable object manipulation is more complex than rigid manipulation.

Recent advances have addressed sensing, modeling, and control challenges.

Future research needs to focus on integrated solutions across all sub-fields.

Abstract

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare sectors. However, compared to rigid object manipulation, the manipulation of deformable objects is considerably more complex, and is still an open research problem. Addressing DOM challenges demand breakthroughs in almost all aspects of robotics, namely hardware design, sensing, (deformation) modeling, planning, and control. In this article, we review recent advances and highlight the main challenges when considering deformation in each sub-field. A particular focus of our paper lies in the discussions of these challenges and proposing future directions of research.