Section: Application Domains

Robotics

Contrary to rigid robots, the number of degrees of freedom (dof) of soft robots is infinite. On the one hand, a great advantage is to multiply the actuators and actuating shapes in the structure to expand the size of the workspace. In the other hand, these actuators are coupled together by the deformation of the robot which makes the control very tricky. Moreover, if colliding their direct environment, the robots may deform and also deform the environment, which complicates even more the control.

This project would build on our recent results, that use a real-time implementation of the finite element method to compute adequately the control of the structure. The present results allow to compute, in real-time, an inverse model of the robot (i.e. provide the displacements of the actuator that creates a desired motion of the end effector of the robot) for a few number of actuators and with simple interactions with its environment. However, the design of the robots, as well as the type of actuator used are far from optimal. The goal of this work is to improve the control methods especially when the robot is in interaction with its environment (by investigating feedback control strategies and by increasing the number of actuators that can be piloted) and to investigate new applications of these devices in medicine (especially for surgical robotics but not only...) and HCI (game, entertainment, art...).