Robotic Manipulation of a Rotating Chain with Bottom End Fixed

TL;DR

This paper presents a manipulation strategy for a robot to control a rotating chain's shape transitions, ensuring stability and feasibility, with practical applications in industrial operations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel manipulation approach leveraging the chain's configuration space homeomorphic to a cube for stable shape transitions.

Findings

Successfully transitioned the chain from rest to rotation modes in experiments.

Demonstrated the manipulation strategy's effectiveness in physical tests.

Applied the method to improve safety and efficiency in industrial processes.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of using a robot arm to manipulate a uniformly rotating chain with its bottom end fixed. Existing studies have investigated ideal rotational shapes for practical applications, yet they do not discuss how these shapes can be consistently achieved through manipulation planning. Our work presents a manipulation strategy for stable and consistent shape transitions. We find that the configuration space of such a chain is homeomorphic to a three-dimensional cube. Using this property, we suggest a strategy to manipulate the chain into different configurations, specifically from one rotation mode to another, while taking stability and feasibility into consideration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy in physical experiments by successfully transitioning from rest to the first two rotation modes. The concepts explored in our work have critical applications in ensuring safety and efficiency of drill string and yarn spinning operations.