Path planning for belt object manipulation

A method to generate an appropriate path for manipulation of a belt object is proposed. It is important for automatic manipulation of a belt object such as a film/flexible circuit board to generate an appropriate path for a manipulator because such object is flexible in a certain direction but fragile in another direction and an inappropriate path which causes deformation in the fragile direction may lead to wiring disconnection. First, deformation of a rectangular belt object is modeled considering its bending and torsional deformation under the force of gravity. Next, a method to generate a path for belt object manipulation with quasi-static and non-excessive deformation is proposed. After that, deformation and loaded condition in the path generated by our proposed method and those in a common path based on linear interpolation are compared. Finally, the validity of our proposed method is verified by measuring the deformed shape of a polyethylene sheet during manipulation with the generated path.