Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Robot. AI

Sec. Robotic Control Systems

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1633131

A Shape Control and Object Manipulation Technique Based on Function Approximation for Robotic Surfaces

Provisionally accepted
Yuchen  ZhaoYuchen Zhao1,2*Yuxin  ChenYuxin Chen1,2
  • 1School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
  • 2Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of Complex Engineering Systems, Nanjing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Robotic surfaces consisting of many actuators can change shape to perform tasks, such as object transportation and sorting. Increasing the number of actuators can enhance the robot's capacity, but controlling a large number of actuators is a challenging problem, such as the increased system-wide refresh time. We propose a novel control method that has constant refresh times no matter how many actuators are in the robot. Having a distributed nature, the method first approximates target shapes, then broadcasts the approximation coefficients to the actuators, and relies on themselves to compute the inputs. To confirm the system size-independent scaling, we build a robot surface and measure the refresh time as a function of the number of actuators. We also perform experiments to approximate target shapes, and a good agreement between the experiments and theoretical predictions is achieved. Our method is more efficient in the sense that it requires fewer control messages to coordinate robot surfaces with the same accuracy. We also present a modeling strategy for the complex robot-object interaction force based on our control method, and derive a feedback controller for object transportation tasks. This feedback controller is further tested by object transportation experiments, and the results demonstrate the validity of the model and the controller.

Keywords: robotic surfaces, object manipulation, Cellular robots, distributed robot systems, Pin array, refresh time scaling

Received: 22 May 2025; Accepted: 02 Oct 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Zhao and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Yuchen Zhao, yuchen.zhao078@qq.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.