Inverse Model for Soft-Robot Control

This SOFA package contains inverse method for soft robotics and have a strong dependency to the SoftRobots plugin. One of the central features is the use of inverse formulation to control the robots by their end-effector position letting the system compute the changes to apply on the inputs of the actuators. The modeling and algorithmic formulations are detailed in [Duriez et al. 2016] and more recent publications.

The FEM robot model can be inverted using an optimization-based method which allows to control the physical robots in the task space. The input of the problem being the desired position of the effector while the output is the force (or the motion) needed to be applied on the actuators. This optimization problem is solved (possibly including additional constraints like contacts) by setting a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem. Read more on the soft robotics toolkit for SOFA online.

Related publications

• Framework for online simulation of soft robots with optimization-based inverse model, [Duriez et al. 2016]
• Software toolkit for modeling, simulation and control of soft robots, [Coevoet et al. 2017a]
• Optimization-Based Inverse Model of Soft Robots With Contact Handling, [Coevoet et al. 2017]

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