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

Abstract

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.

69 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Understanding, Visualizing and Interpreting Deep Learning Models
• Modeling, Reduction, and Control of a Helically Actuated Inertial Soft Robotic Arm via the Koopman Operator
• When Kinematics Dominates Mechanics: Locally Volume-Preserving Primitives for Model Reduction in Finite Elasticity

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• Stepwise Model Reconstruction of Robotic Manipulator Based on Data-Driven Method
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• Real-Time Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Tasks with a Parallel Soft Robot
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• Real-time Dynamics of Soft Manipulators with Cross-section Inflation: Application to the Octopus Muscular Hydrostat
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• Model Predictive Control for a Soft Robotic Finger with Stochastic Behavior based on Fokker-Planck Equation
• EquiMus: Energy-Equivalent Dynamic Modeling and Simulation of Musculoskeletal Robots Driven by Linear Elastic Actuators
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