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Estimating the deformability of elastic materials using optical flow and position-based dynamics

Knowledge of the physical properties of objects is essential in a wide range of robotic manipulation scenarios. A robot may not always be aware of such properties prior to interaction. If an object is incorrectly assumed to be rigid, it may exhibit unpredictable behavior when grasped. In this paper, we use vision based observation of the behavior of an object a robot is interacting with and use it as the basis for estimation of its elastic deformability. This is estimated in a local region around the interaction point using a physics simulator. We use optical flow to estimate the parameters of a position-based dynamics simulation using meshless shape matching (MSM). MSM has been widely used in computer graphics due to its computational efficiency, which is also important for closed-loop control in robotics. In a controlled experiment we demonstrate that our method can qualitatively estimate the physical properties of objects with different degrees of deformability.