This proposal presents a plan to attack the problem of manipulating flexible materials like string and wire using minimal sensing and actuation. Flexible materials are ubiquitous in manufacturung and surgery, and human examples demonstrate that complex manipulation of flexible materials is possible, from knot-tying to folding laundry or even origami. Robots are currently far less capable in these domains, leaving many boring, repetitive factory tasks inaccessible to robotic automation. Current simulation models of flexible objects are too computationally complex for standard approaches to manipulation planning to be effective. Furthermore, although the simulated dynamic behavior of a piece of string using existing models might be visually believable, the behavior is unlikely to match any particular piece of string in the real world and, therefore, is of limited use.
Knot tying has many applications ranging from manufacturing to surgery to agriculture and service robots. Manipulation of deformable objects is fundamental to many manufacturing and household applications. The proposed work has application to factory operations and seems to apply to potential future needs in manipulation of linear, flexible 1-D structures such as carbon nanotubes and proteins.
Broader Impacts: The development of reliable, inexpensive techniques for manipulation of flexible materials goes beyond the obvious potential impact on factory automation. Minimalism is particularly appropriate for problems involving manipulation at new scales. Fixtures for tying knots might be built at the microscale, allowing parallel manipulation of many very tiny threads or rods. Although we emphasize that the focus of the current work is on theoretical foundations and manipulation at the macro-scale, one can imagine using cleverly-designed geometries to manipulate carbon nano-tubes or proteins - things not possible with standard serial arm designs.
