15 May 2024
Soft robots have long promised to change the way robots interact with the environment. One significant challenge is the design, modeling and control of soft manipulators. They have been developed in many forms and structures, and can show a wide range of deformation in response to interactions with the environment. Moreover, thanks to their compliance they inherently show robust reactions to impacts and adaptation to the environment. However, their capacity to deform in theoretically infinite degrees of freedom opens clear modeling and control challenges.
To control such system, reduced order models are needed; typically models consider piecewise sections of constant curvature although external forces often deform the structure out of the constant curvature hypothesis. In this work, EMERGE partners from Delft University of Technology and collaborators performed an analysis of the trade-off between computational treatability and modelling accuracy.
The authors propose a new kinematic model, the Piecewise Affine Curvature (PAC) which they validate theoretically and experimentally showing that this higher-order model better captures the configuration of a soft continuum body robot when perturbed by the external forces. In comparison to the current state of the art Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) model the group demonstrates up to 30% reduction in error for the end position of a soft continuum body robot.
Read the paper in the link below.
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