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1. A Dexterous, Glove-Based Teleoperable Low-Power Soft Robotic Arm for Delicate Deep-Sea Biological Exploration

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-33138-y  

   Phillips, Brennan T. ; Becker, Kaitlyn P. ; Kurumaya, Shunichi ; Galloway, Kevin C. ; Whittredge, Griffin ; Vogt, Daniel M. ; Teeple, Clark B. ; Rosen, Michelle H. ; Pieribone, Vincent A. ; Gruber, David F. ; et al ( October 2018 , Scientific Reports)

   Modern marine biologists seeking to study or interact with deep-sea organisms are confronted with few options beyond industrial robotic arms, claws, and suction samplers. This limits biological interactions to a subset of “rugged” and mostly immotile fauna. As the deep sea is one of the most biologically diverse and least studied ecosystems on the planet, there is much room for innovation in facilitating delicate interactions with a multitude of organisms. The biodiversity and physiology of shallow marine systems, such as coral reefs, are common study targets due to the easier nature of access; SCUBA diving allows forin situdelicate human interactions. Beyond the range of technical SCUBA (~150 m), the ability to achieve the same level of human dexterity using robotic systems becomes critically important. The deep ocean is navigated primarily by manned submersibles or remotely operated vehicles, which currently offer few options for delicate manipulation. Here we present results in developing a soft robotic manipulator for deep-sea biological sampling. This low-power glove-controlled soft robot was designed with the future marine biologist in mind, where science can be conducted at a comparable or better means than via a human diver and at depths well beyond the limits of SCUBA. The technologymore »relies on compliant materials that are matched with the soft and fragile nature of marine organisms, and uses seawater as the working fluid. Actuators are driven by a custom proportional-control hydraulic engine that requires less than 50 W of electrical power, making it suitable for battery-powered operation. A wearable glove master allows for intuitive control of the arm. The manipulator system has been successfully operated in depths exceeding 2300 m (3500 psi) and has been field-tested onboard a manned submersible and unmanned remotely operated vehicles. The design, development, testing, and field trials of the soft manipulator is placed in context with existing systems and we offer suggestions for future work based on these findings.

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2. Control-oriented Modeling of Soft Robotic Swimmer with Koopman Operators

   https://doi.org/10.1109/AIM43001.2020.9159033  

   Castano, Maria L. ; Hess, Andrew ; Mamakoukas, Giorgos ; Gao, Tong ; Murphey, Todd ; Tan, Xiaobo ( July 2020 , 2020 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM))

   Interest in soft robotics has increased in recent years due to their potential in a myriad of applications. A wide variety of soft robots has emerged, including bio-inspired robotic swimmers such as jellyfish, rays, and robotic fish. However, the highly nonlinear fluid-structure interactions pose considerable challenges in the analysis, modeling, and feedback control of these soft robotic swimmers. In particular, developing models that are of high fidelity but are also amenable to control for such robots remains an open problem. In this work, we pro- pose a data-driven approach that exploits Koopman operators to obtain a linear representation of the soft swimmer dynamics. Specifically, two methodologies are explored for obtaining the basis functions of the the operator, one based on data-based derivatives estimated using high-gain observers, and the other based on the dynamics structure of a tail-actuated rigid-body robotic fish. The resulting approximate finite-dimensional operators are trained and evaluated using data from high-fidelity CFD simulations that incorporate fluid-structure interactions. Validation results demonstrate that, while both methods are promising in producing control-oriented models, the approach based on derivative estimates shows higher accuracy in state prediction.
3. Synthetic Muscle Electroactive Polymer (EAP) pressure sensing and controlled shape-morphing for robotic grippers

   https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2583295  

   Briggs, Calum ; Cheng, Tianyu ; Meredith, Margot ; Vicars, Peter N. ; Rasmussen, Lenore ; Zhong, Alexander ( March 2021 , Proc. SPIE 11587, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) XXIII,)

   Madden, John D. ; Anderson, Iain A. ; Shea, Herbert R. (Ed.)

   Ras Labs makes Synthetic Muscle™, which is a class of electroactive polymer (EAP) based materials and actuators that sense pressure (gentle touch to high impact), controllably contract and expand at low voltage (1.5 V to 50 V, including use of batteries), and attenuate force. We are in the robotics era, but robots do have their challenges. Currently, robotic sensing is mainly visual, which is useful up until the point of contact. To understand how an object is being gripped, tactile feedback is needed. For handling fragile objects, if the grip is too tight, breakage occurs, and if the grip is too loose, the object will slip out of the grasp, also leading to breakage. Rigid robotic grippers using a visual feedback loop can struggle to determine the exact point and quality of contact. Robotic grippers can also get a stuttering effect in the visual feedback loop. By using soft Synthetic Muscle™ based EAP pads as the sensors, immediate feedback was generated at the first point of contact. Because these pads provided a soft, compliant interface, the first point of contact did not apply excessive force, allowing the force applied to the object to be controlled. The EAP sensor could alsomore »detect a change in pressure location on its surface, making it possible to detect and prevent slippage by then adjusting the grip strength. In other words, directional glide provided feedback for the presence of possible slippage to then be able to control a slightly tighter grip, without stutter, due to both the feedback and the soft gentleness of the fingertip-like EAP pads themselves. The soft nature of the EAP fingertip pad also naturally held the gripped object, improving the gripping quality over rigid grippers without an increase in applied force. Analogous to finger-like tactile touch, the EAPs with appropriate coatings and electronics were positioned as pressure sensors in the fingertip or end effector regions of robotic grippers. This development of using Synthetic Muscle™ based EAPs as soft sensors provided for sensors that feel like the pads of human fingertips. Basic pressure position and magnitude tests have been successful, with pressure sensitivity down to 0.05 N. Most automation and robots are very strong, very fast, and usually need to be partitioned away from humans for safety reasons. For many repetitive tasks that humans do with delicate or fragile objects, it would be beneficial to use robotics; whether it is for agriculture, medical surgery, therapeutic or personal care, or in extreme environments where humans cannot enter, including with contagions that have no cure. Synthetic Muscle™ was also retrofitted as actuator systems into off-the-shelf robotic grippers and is being considered in novel biomimetic gripper designs, operating at low voltages (less than 50 V). This offers biomimetic movement by contracting like human muscles, but also exceeds natural biological capabilities by expanding under reversed electric polarity. Human grasp is gentle yet firm, with tactile touch feedback. In conjunction with shape-morphing abilities, these EAPs also are being explored to intrinsically sense pressure due to the correlation between mechanical force applied to the EAP and its electronic signature. The robotic field is experiencing phenomenal growth in this fourth phase of the industrial revolution, the robotics era. The combination of Ras Labs’ EAP shape-morphing and sensing features promises the potential for robotic grippers with human hand-like control and tactile sensing. This work is expected to advance both robotics and prosthetics, particularly for collaborative robotics to allow humans and robots to intuitively work safely and effectively together.« less
4. Prediction of the behavior of a pneumatic soft robot based on Koopman operator theory

   https://doi.org/10.23919/MIPRO48935.2020.9245155  

   Kamenar, E. ; Crnjaric-Zic, N. ; Haggerty, D. ; Zelenika, S. ; Hawkes, E. W. ; Mezic, I. ( September 2020 , MIPRO)

   Thanks to their flexibility, soft robotic devices offer critical advantages over rigid robots, allowing adaptation to uncertainties in the environment. As such, soft robots enable various intriguing applications, including human-safe interaction devices, soft active rehabilitation devices, and soft grippers for pick-and-place tasks in industrial environments. In most cases, soft robots use pneumatic actuation to inflate the channels in a compliant material to obtain the movement of the structure. However, due to their flexibility and nonlinear behavior, as well as the compressibility of air, controlled movements of the soft robotic structure are difficult to attain. Obtaining physically-based mathematical models, which would enable the development of suitable control approaches for soft robots, constitutes thus a critical challenge in the field. The aim of this work is, therefore, to predict the movement of a pneumatic soft robot by using a data-driven approach based on the Koopman operator framework. The Koopman operator allows simplifying a nonlinear system by“lifting” its dynamics into a higher dimensional space, where its behavior can be accurately approximated by a linear model, thus allowing a significant reduction of the complexity of the design of the resulting controllers.
5. A pneumatic random-access memory for controlling soft robots

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254524  

   Hoang, Shane ; Karydis, Konstantinos ; Brisk, Philip ; Grover, William H. ( July 2021 , PLOS ONE)

   Mattoli, Virgilio (Ed.)

   Pneumatically-actuated soft robots have advantages over traditional rigid robots in many applications. In particular, their flexible bodies and gentle air-powered movements make them more suitable for use around humans and other objects that could be injured or damaged by traditional robots. However, existing systems for controlling soft robots currently require dedicated electromechanical hardware (usually solenoid valves) to maintain the actuation state (expanded or contracted) of each independent actuator. When combined with power, computation, and sensing components, this control hardware adds considerable cost, size, and power demands to the robot, thereby limiting the feasibility of soft robots in many important application areas. In this work, we introduce a pneumatic memory that uses air (not electricity) to set and maintain the states of large numbers of soft robotic actuators without dedicated electromechanical hardware. These pneumatic logic circuits use normally-closed microfluidic valves as transistor-like elements; this enables our circuits to support more complex computational functions than those built from normally-open valves. We demonstrate an eight-bit nonvolatile random-access pneumatic memory (RAM) that can maintain the states of multiple actuators, control both individual actuators and multiple actuators simultaneously using a pneumatic version of time division multiplexing (TDM), and set actuators to any intermediate position usingmore »a pneumatic version of analog-to-digital conversion. We perform proof-of-concept experimental testing of our pneumatic RAM by using it to control soft robotic hands playing individual notes, chords, and songs on a piano keyboard. By dramatically reducing the amount of hardware required to control multiple independent actuators in pneumatic soft robots, our pneumatic RAM can accelerate the spread of soft robotic technologies to a wide range of important application areas.« less