Theoretical modeling of soft robotics systems: from continuum mechanics to neural networks

Lecturer: dr. Costanza Armanini (Post-Doctoral Fellow Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE)

Timetable: 20-30 June 2022

Monday 20/06 - Thursday 23/06 - Monday 27/06 - Thursday 30/06 hours 16:00 - 18:00

The lecturer will send the Zoom link to all participants.

Abstract: The term soft robot appeared for the first time in a scientific paper in 2000, describing a McKibben pnenumatic artificial muscle, a family of braided pneumatic actuators developed in the 50s to assist polio patients. Even though they were not explicitly called soft robots, McKibben actuators probably represent the first example of a robotic device exploiting its compliance to achieve improved performances with respect to their exclusively rigid counterpart. Since then, soft robotics has been one of the fastest growing research community in the last decades, ranging in almost every possible technological field, from biomedical engineering to aerospace and underwater robotics.

While the kinematic modeling of traditional rigid-link robots is fully defined by the link dimensions and the joint coordinates, the virtually infinite number of degrees of freedom of continuum robots drastically increases the complexity of their modeling. Analytic closed form solutions are available only for few cases characterized by basic loading condition and mostly one-dimensional cases. For this reason, one of the biggest efforts in the modeling of soft robots is the investigation of simplified assumptions and model reductions that are accurate enough to predict the robot's behaviour and, at the same time, that are computationally efficient.

Different solutions have been presented to overcome these difficulties, often leveraging on other scientific disciplines, such as continuum mechanics and computer graphics. The present course will go through the most popular families of techniques that have been presented so far, highlighting their common theoretical roots and analysing their main connections and differences.

Programme: 

1. Continuum Mechanics Based Models: FEM, Cosserat Rods and Euler Bernoulli Beams;
2. Geometrical Models: Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) and Functional methods;
3. Discrete Models: discrete rods (DER), pseudo-rigid and lumped-mass models;
4. Surrogate Models: Neural Networks and Data Driven.

Duration: 8 hours (1 credit)

Registration: please send an email to dicamphd [at] unitn.it