FEM-Based Nonlinear Controller for a Soft Trunk Robot

Soft robots have been attracting much research attention in the past decades owing to their unique properties that are inherently different from conventional rigid robots. The intrinsic characteristics of soft robots, such as compliance and flexibility, have made them a promising supplement for many existing robotic applications. For instance, soft robots provide safer human-machine interaction and better adaptability to unexplored environments than the conventional rigid ones. However, their “soft” feature would conversely cause complex material deformation due to their high-DoF nature, which has made their kinematic or dynamic models more difficult to deduce. Logically, the process of designing model-based controllers would therefore suffer from the lack of efficient and accurate modeling methods. In this letter, through adopting Finite Element Method (FEM), we demonstrate a FEM-based nonlinear control method for a soft trunk robot to achieve trajectory tracking objectives. The proposed controller is developed by utilizing the essential information from the dynamic FE model of the studied robot. The details of deriving this nonlinear control method are demonstrated, then followed by 4 practical experiments on the soft truck robot to verify the feasibility of the control method. The corresponding experimental results are presented accordingly.