Model Based Control of Soft Robots: A Survey of the State of the Art and Open Challenges

10/04/2021
by   Cosimo Della Santina, et al.
0

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a monkey's tail). This work aims to introduce the control theorist perspective to this novel development in robotics. We aim to remove the barriers to entry into this field by presenting existing results and future challenges using a unified language and within a coherent framework. Indeed, the main difficulty in entering this field is the wide variability of terminology and scientific backgrounds, making it quite hard to acquire a comprehensive view on the topic. Another limiting factor is that it is not obvious where to draw a clear line between the limitations imposed by the technology not being mature yet and the challenges intrinsic to this class of robots. In this work, we argue that the intrinsic effects are the continuum or multi-body dynamics, the presence of a non-negligible elastic potential field, and the variability in sensing and actuation strategies.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
06/12/2023

Stochastic Approach for Modeling a Soft Robotic Finger with Creep Behavior

Soft robots have high adaptability and safeness which are derived from t...
research
03/21/2023

Dynamic models for Planar Peristaltic Locomotion of a Metameric Earthworm-like Robot

The development of versatile robots capable of traversing challenging an...
research
06/21/2018

Using Nonlinear Normal Modes for Execution of Efficient Cyclic Motions in Soft Robots

With the aim of getting closer to the performance of the animal musclesk...
research
01/23/2023

Koopman Operators for Modeling and Control of Soft Robotics

Purpose of review: We review recent advances in algorithmic development ...
research
05/16/2018

Category theory as a foundation for soft robotics

Soft robotics is an emerging field of research where the robot body is c...
research
01/23/2020

2D-VSR-Sim: an Optimization-friendly Simulator of 2-D Voxel-based Soft Robots

Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs) are aggregations of soft blocks whose des...
research
01/23/2020

Design, Validation, and Case Studies of 2D-VSR-Sim, an Optimization-friendly Simulator of 2-D Voxel-based Soft Robots

Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs) are aggregations of soft blocks whose des...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset