Bilateral Teleoperation of Soft Robots under Piecewise Constant Curvature Hypothesis: An Experimental Investigation

The field of soft robotics has evinced considerable interest recently due to its importance in several practical applications. Teleoperation of a soft manipulator to do a multitude of tasks in a remote environment is one such promising application. The dexterity and conformity of a soft robot can be constructively utilized for enhanced motion planning and manipulability in cluttered environments. To that end, this paper investigates an adaptive task space bilateral teleoperation framework for soft robots with dynamic uncertainties assuming a non-redundant rigid master manipulator and a redundant soft slave manipulator under the piecewise constant curvature hypothesis. First, the dynamics of the soft robot are approximated as a rigid link manipulator with elastic joints using an existing augmented formulation in the literature. The task space adaptive bilateral teleoperation framework is then introduced based on this rigid-robot-like formulation. The null space velocity of the soft robot is also exploited to achieve sub-task objectives. Finally, the proposed control algorithms are experimentally investigated on a planar soft robot and the results are discussed pointing out the important observations.