Compliant Robust Control for Robotic Insertion of Soft Bodies

This paper proposes a novel framework for insertion-type tasks with soft bodies, such as cleaning a bottle with a soft brush. First, a multimodal model based on vision and force perception is trained. Domain randomization is used for the soft body’s properties to overcome the simulation-to- reality gap. Second, we propose a dynamic safety lock method based on force perception, which is embedded in the training model to make sure that the tool explores and traverses the hole’s path in a compliant way. This result in a higher success rate without damaging the tools/holes. Finally, we perform experiments in simulation and the real world, and the success rate of our proposed method reaches 85.14% in simulation and 83.45% in the real world. Ablation experiments in the real world demon- strate that our method is effective for complex paths and soft bodies with varying deformation intensities. Videos and code are supplied in https://0707yiliu.github.io/SoftBodyInsertion/.