Quadratic Dynamic Matrix Control for Fast Cloth Manipulation

Robotic cloth manipulation is an increasingly relevant area of research, challenging classic control algorithms due to the deformable nature of cloth. While it is possible to apply linear model predictive control to make the robot move the cloth according to a given reference, this approach suffers from a large dimensionality of the state-space representation of the cloth models. To address this issue, in this work we study the application of an input-output model predictive control strategy, based on quadratic dynamic matrix control, to robotic cloth manipulation. To account for uncertain disturbances on the cloth's motion, we further extend the algorithm with suitable chance constraints. In extensive simulated experiments, involving disturbances and obstacle avoidance, we show that quadratic dynamic matrix control can be successfully applied in different cloth manipulation scenarios, with significant gains in optimization speed compared to standard model predictive control strategies. The experiments further demonstrate that the closed-loop model used by quadratic dynamic matrix control can be beneficial to the tracking accuracy, leading to improvements over the standard predictive control strategy. Moreover, a preliminary experiment on a real robot shows that quadratic dynamic matrix control can indeed be employed in real settings.