Controllability pre-verification of silicone soft robots based on finite-element method

Soft robot is an emergent research field which has variant promising applications. However, the design of soft robots nowadays still follows the trial-and-error process, which is not at all efficient. This paper proposes to design soft robots by pre-checking controllability during the numerical design phase. Finite-element method is used to model the dynamics of silicone soft robots, based on which the differential geometric method is applied to analyze the controllability of the points of interest. Such a verification is also investigated via model order reduction technique and Galerkin projection. The proposed methodology is finally validated by numerically designing a controllable parallel soft robot.