Motion Planning for Fluid Manipulation using Simplified Dynamics
This addresses the challenge of efficient and accurate motion planning for robotic fluid manipulation, which is incremental as it builds on existing optimization methods with a simplified model.
The paper tackles the problem of motion planning for fluid manipulation by developing an optimization-based algorithm that computes smooth, collision-free trajectories for a manipulator transferring liquid, using a simplified dynamics model to avoid high computational costs; it demonstrates performance on various benchmarks and validates accuracy with Navier-Stokes simulations.
We present an optimization-based motion planning algorithm to compute a smooth, collision-free trajectory for a manipulator used to transfer a liquid from a source to a target container. We take into account fluid dynamics constraints as part of trajectory computation. In order to avoid the high complexity of exact fluid simulation, we introduce a simplified dynamics model based on physically inspired approximations and system identification. Our optimization approach can incorporate various other constraints such as collision avoidance with the obstacles, kinematic and dynamics constraints of the manipulator, and fluid dynamics characteristics. We demonstrate the performance of our planner on different benchmarks corresponding to various obstacles and container shapes. Furthermore, we also evaluate its accuracy by validating the motion plan using an accurate but computationally costly Navier-Stokes fluid simulation.