1. Introduction

Typical flexible object manipulation by robots has been performed in a static state or a quasi-static state [1–7]. In these methods, dynamical deformation of the flexible object is not considered, making it easier to manipulate the flexible object. However, the robots have to wait until the deformation converges to the steady state, which results in the manipulation time being very long, and the working efficiency is not good. Moreover, although it is desired to manipulate the flexible object while observing its deformation with cameras, the working efficiency becomes even worse because of the low speed of the cameras and image processing for recognizing the deformation. In addition, a deformation that changes momentarily cannot be recognized in real time by general-purpose cameras and image processing, and appropriate feedback control may not be carried out because of the latency from the recognition to the robot motion.

#### Becoming Human with Humanoid - From Physical Interaction to Social Intelligence

Recently, dynamic manipulations and nonprehensile manipulations of objects have been actively investigated with the goal of developing new manipulation techniques [8]. Our goal has been to achieve high-speed flexible object manipulation by handling the flexible object in a "dynamic," nonprehensile state. As a result, we succeeded in simplifying the deformation model of flexible objects by using the high-speed motion of a high-speed robot, and we were able to perform appropriate real-time visual feedback control with a high-speed vision system. This dynamic manipulation technique may enable rapid realization of flexible object manipulation tasks.

In this chapter, we review the proposed method based on high-speed motion and visual feedback, and we demonstrate several tasks carried out by a high-speed robot system using the proposed method.
