15 May 2023
The birth and development of soft robotics is strongly tied to bio-inspiration and biomimicry. The capabilities of animals like the octopus or the elephant are facilitated by the softness of their bodies, and by their senses which allow them to intelligently explore the environment and make internal models based on the sensory data. The elephant, for example, is known to heavily depend upon the sense of smell through its trunk for cognitive tasks.
Soft robots would also benefit from an artificial sense of smell, which could be helpful in typical soft robotic tasks such as search and rescue, pipe inspection, and all the tasks involving unstructured environments.
In this work, EMERGE partners from Delft University of Technology and collaborators propose an artificial nose on a soft robotic arm that ensures separate smell concentration readings. They propose designing the nose to generate a one-to-one matching between the sensors' inputs and the actuators. This design choice allows the implementation of a simple control strategy tailored to reach a dynamically varying smell in the environment, which we validate on a two-segment tendon-driven soft robotic arm equipped with the proposed artificial nose. The authors also propose and validate in simulation a control strategy for reaching tasks in the case of a stationary smell.
Read the paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/RoboSoft55895.2023.10122116
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