Prescribed Performance Control of Deformable Object Manipulation in Spatial Latent Space

Manipulating 3-D deformable objects presents significant challenges for robotic systems due to their infinite-dimensional state space and complex deformable dynamics. This article proposes a novel model-free approach for shape control with constraints imposed on key points. Unlike existing methods that rely on feature dimensionality reduction, the proposed controller leverages the coordinates of key points as the feature vector, which are extracted from the deformable object's point cloud using deep learning methods. This approach not only reduces the dimensionality of the feature space but also retains the spatial information of the object. By extracting key points, the manipulation of deformable objects is simplified into a visual servoing problem, where the shape dynamics are described using a deformation Jacobian matrix. To enhance control accuracy, a prescribed performance control method is developed by integrating barrier Lyapunov functions to enforce constraints on the key points. The stability of the closed-loop system is rigorously analyzed and verified using the Lyapunov method. Experimental results further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.