Soft robots characterize operational safety due to inherent compliance from their soft mechanism, whereas their mechanism enhances the difficulty in accurate closed-loop control. To explore their applicability in manipulation tasks, in this article, we propose a visual servoing pushing controller considering the effect of contact. The controller is designed to simultaneously complete the positioning and manipulation tasks. To further improve the manipulation performance, an active pushing force regulation method is proposed and integrated into the controller. The proposed control algorithm is validated experimentally. The results show that the controller guarantees the convergence to the image error and meanwhile, it improves the pushing manipulation performance.
Keywords: interactive control; push manipulation; pushing control; soft robot; visual servo.