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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 1, 2024
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available August 1, 2024
  3. Free, publicly-accessible full text available August 1, 2024
  4. Abstract Purpose of Review

    We review recent advances in algorithmic development and validation for modeling and control of soft robots leveraging the Koopman operator theory.

    Recent Findings

    We identify the following trends in recent research efforts in this area. (1) The design of lifting functions used in the data-driven approximation of the Koopman operator is critical for soft robots. (2) Robustness considerations are emphasized. Works are proposed to reduce the effect of uncertainty and noise during the process of modeling and control. (3) The Koopman operator has been embedded into different model-based control structures to drive the soft robots.

    Summary

    Because of their compliance and nonlinearities, modeling and control of soft robots face key challenges. To resolve these challenges, Koopman operator-based approaches have been proposed, in an effort to express the nonlinear system in a linear manner. The Koopman operator enables global linearization to reduce nonlinearities and/or serves as model constraints in model-based control algorithms for soft robots. Various implementations in soft robotic systems are illustrated and summarized in the review.

     
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  5. Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the intricacies of the terrain at hand, thus enabling robust and resilient locomotion. In this paper we capitalize upon recent developments on soft pneumatic legged robots to introduce a closed-loop trajectory tracking control scheme for operation over flat ground. Closed-loop pneumatic actuation feedback is achieved via a compact and portable pneumatic regulation board. Experimental results reveal that our soft legged robot can precisely control its body height and orientation while in quasi-static operation based on a geometric model. The robot can track both straight line and curved trajectories as well as variable-height trajectories. This work lays the basis to enable autonomous navigation for soft legged robots. 
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