Soft Robotics-Autonomous Robot Laboratory

Soft Robotics

Major Research Fields


Bionic Design of Soft Robot	Modeling of Soft Robot	Control of Soft Robot

Bionic Design of Soft Robot

Design of Cable Driven Soft Robot

Inspired by the structure of "Muscular Hydrostat", we design a cable driven soft robot to realize the complex functions of the trunk. Cables are used to simulate the longitudinal muscles.

Modeling of Soft Robot

Kinematic Model of a Cable Driven Soft Robot

According to the geometric relations of the cable driven soft robot and the piecewise constant curvature assumption, we build a kinematic model to establish the relationship between driving cables and our soft robot.

Dynamic Model of A Cable Driven Soft robot

Based on the Kaine method, we establish a dynamic model with considering the inertia force, gravity, elastic internal force and cable driving force.

Control of Soft Robot

	Visual Servoing of Soft Robot Manipulator in Unconstrained Environments A CCD camera is embedded in the soft robot for the eye-in-hand visual system of feature point target tracking. With a single camera, the controller design of the visual servo system is carried out by using depth independent matrix.
	Visual Servoing of Soft Robot Manipulator in Constrained Environments To solve the crowded environment (such as operative cavity environment) eye-in-hand visual servo problem, a adaptive controller is designed. This experiment is to simulate the feature point tracking task with external environment interference.
	Position Control of Soft Robot with Optical Fiber Proximity Sensor Optical fiber sensors are embedded in the soft robot for heart dynamic tracking case. The distance change between the fiber tip and the reflective surface is observed by the light intensity changes of the receiving fiber, which is then detected by an optical detector.
	Pose Control of Soft Robot with Optical Fiber Proximity Sensor Based on the difference of optical fiber sensors information, the end pose of the soft robot is adjusted.
	Force Control of Soft Robot with Force Sensor A thin-film force sensor or a optical fiber force sensor is embedded in the soft robot for dynamic force tracking, so that the force between a target and our robot tip remain Unchanged.
	Shape Estimation and Control of Soft Robot The shape estimation and control of the soft robot are very important for the state perception of the robot. The distributed fiber Bragg grating sensor network is constructed by equal distance grating of optical fiber. Detection of the reflected light wavelength is used to determine the bending position, so that shape estimation and control could be realized.