Section: New Results

Physics based model of soft-robots

Book chapter in Soft Robotics: Trends, Applications and Challenges, Springer, 2016 Soft Robot Modeling, Simulation and Control in Real-Time, Christian Duriez and Thor Bieze. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01410293. We were asked to write a chapter in this book on Soft Robotics. Our chapter presents new real-time and physics-based modeling methods dedicated to deformable soft robots. In our approach, continuum mechanics provides the partial derivative equations that govern the deformations, and Finite Element Method (FEM) is used to compute numerical solutions adapted to the robot. A formulation based on Lagrange Multipliers is presented to model the behavior of the actuators as well as the contact with the environment. Direct and inverse kinematic models are also obtained for real-time control. Some experiments and numerical results are presented.