A Validated Physical Model For Real-Time Simulation of Soft Robotic Snakes
New paper on validated physical models for soft robot snakes out at ICRA 2019
Authors
Renato Gasoto, Miles Macklin, Xuan Liu, Yinan Sun, Kenny Erleben, Cagdas Onal, and Jie Fu
Abstract
In this work, we present a framework that is capable of accurately representing soft robotic actuators in a multiphysics environment in real-time. We propose a constraint-based dynamics model of a 1-dimensional pneumatic soft actuator that accounts for internal pressure forces, as well as the effect of actuator latency and damping under inflation and deflation and demonstrate its accuracy a full soft robotic snake with the composition of multiple 1D actuators. We verify our model’s accuracy in static deformation and dynamic locomotion open-loop control experiments. To achieve the real-time performance we leverage the parallel computation power of GPUs to allow interactive control and feedback.
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