15 October 2025
Deploying robots in human-centered environments, such as assisting workers in manufacturing or supporting older adults in everyday activities, demands not only demonstrable safety but also user confidence in the robot’s behavior. Continuum soft manipulators promise safety through material compliance, but as designs evolve for greater precision, payload capacity, and speed, and increasingly incorporate rigid elements, their injury risk resurfaces.
Their approach combines a differentiable Piecewise Cosserat-Segment (PCS) dynamics model with a convex-polygon distance approximation metric, named Differentiable Conservative Separating Axis Theorem (DCSAT), based on the soft robot geometry to enable real-time, whole-body collision detection, resolution, and enforcement of the safety constraints. By embedding High-Order Control Barrier Function (HOCBF) into their optimization routine, they guarantee safety, allowing, for instance, safe navigation in operational space under High-Order Control Lyapunov Function (HOCLF) driven motion objectives.
Read the paper in the link below.
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