US 12,420,406 B1
Pneumatic system modeling
Tianjian Chen, New York, NY (US); and Andrew D Marchese, Concord, MA (US)
Assigned to Amazon Technologies, Inc., Seattle, WA (US)
Filed by Amazon Technologies, Inc., Seattle, WA (US)
Filed on Mar. 30, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/708,898.
Int. Cl. B25J 9/16 (2006.01); B25J 15/06 (2006.01); B65G 47/91 (2006.01)
CPC B25J 9/1605 (2013.01) [B25J 9/1607 (2013.01); B25J 9/1653 (2013.01); B25J 15/0616 (2013.01); B65G 47/917 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A computer-implemented method, comprising:
accessing a pneumatic component graph of a pneumatic system that comprises first vertices corresponding to a set of pneumatic components of the pneumatic system and first edges corresponding to connections between the set of pneumatic components of the pneumatic system;
generating a pneumatic element graph of the pneumatic system based at least in part on the pneumatic component graph, the pneumatic element graph comprising second vertices corresponding to air pressures of interest and second edges corresponding to pneumatic elements, the pneumatic element graph comprising the set of pneumatic components comprising a pneumatic end effector comprising a plurality of suction devices, the pneumatic element graph representing pneumatic elements of the set of pneumatic components and relationships between individual pneumatic components of the set of pneumatic components, the pneumatic system being associated with a robotic manipulation system that includes the pneumatic end effector;
receiving, via a user input, a set of input controls that correspond to i) an operational command of at a first pneumatic component of the set of pneumatic components, and ii) a geometric feature of a second pneumatic component of the set of pneumatic components, wherein the second pneumatic component comprises a suction device and the geometric feature comprises a distance between the suction device and an object to be manipulated;
determining iteratively, for the set of pneumatic components, individual sets of updated pressure states based at least in part on respective previous pressure states of individual pneumatic components of the set of pneumatic components; and
performing an operational sequence of the robotic manipulation system using the individual sets of updated pressure states.