Real-time simulation of hydraulic components for interactive control of soft robots

Alejandro Rodríguez (1) , Eulalie Coevoet (2) , Christian Duriez (2)

1 UGR - Universidad de Granada = University of Granada
2 DEFROST - Deformable Robots Simulation Team

In this work we propose a new method for online motion planning in the task-space for hydraulic actuated soft robots. Our solution relies on the interactive resolution of an inverse kinematics problem, that takes into account the properties (mass, stiffness) of the deformable material used to build the robot. An accurate modeling of the mechanical behavior of hydraulic components is based on a novel GPU parallel method for the real-time computation of fluid weight distribution. The efficiency of the method is further increased by a novel GPU parallel leveraging mechanism. Our complete solution has been integrated within the open-source SOFA framework. In our results, we validate our simulation with a fabricated silicone cylinder and we demonstrate the usage of our approach for direct control of hydraulic soft robots.

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Alejandro Rodríguez, Eulalie Coevoet, Christian Duriez. Real-time simulation of hydraulic components for interactive control of soft robots. The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2017, Singapour, Singapore. ⟨hal-01535810⟩