Motion and shape control of soft robots and materials

A continuum-based approach for simultaneously controlling the motion and shape of soft robots and materials (SRM) is proposed. This approach allows for systematically computing the actuation forces for arbitrary desired SRM motion and geometry. In order to control both motion and shape, the position and position gradients of the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) are used to formulate rheonomic specified trajectory and shape constraint equations, used in an inverse dynamics procedure to define the actuation control forces. Unlike control of rigid-body systems which requires a number of independent actuation forces equal to the number of the joint coordinates, the SRM motion/shape control leads to generalized control forces which need to be interpreted differently in order to properly define the actuation forces. While the definition of these motion/shape control forces is demonstrated using air pressure actuation commonly used in the SRM control, the proposed procedure can be applied to other SRM actuation types. The approaches for determining the actuation pressure in the two cases of space-dependent and constant pressures are outlined. Effect of the change in the surface geometry on the actuation pressure is accounted for using Nanson’s formula . The obtained numerical results demonstrate that the motion and shape can be simultaneously controlled using the new actuation force definitions.