Robotic Interaction with Deformable Objects under Vision and Tactile Guidance - a Review

This paper overviews the modern concepts adopted by the robotics community during the past decade related to 3D deformable object grasping and manipulation mainly guided by vision and force/tactile sensing. It also examines the new trends on rigid objects manipulation which can be extended to deformable objects. This constitutes a challenging area of research because of the complexity of interactions between the robot manipulator and the deformable object due to its deformation. To this effect, there are many issues to be considered in order to develop a truly autonomous robotic system that can successfully manipulate 3D deformable objects. This investigation concludes by proposing viable solutions for designing an intelligent robotic framework to manipulate 3D deformable objects without any human intervention.