A MATLAB Toolbox for Hybrid Rigid Soft Robots Based on the Geometric Variable Strain Approach
It provides a user-friendly tool for the soft robotics community, addressing limited available tools, but is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The paper introduces SoRoSim, a MATLAB toolbox for modeling and analyzing soft, rigid, or hybrid robots using the Geometric Variable Strain approach, validated against literature and demonstrated through four sample applications.
Soft robotics has been a trending topic within the robotics community for almost two decades. However, available tools for the modeling and analysis of soft robots are still limited. This paper introduces a user-friendly MATLAB toolbox, Soft Robot Simulator (SoRoSim), that integrates the Geometric Variable Strain (GVS) model of Cosserat rods to facilitate the static and dynamic analysis of soft, rigid, or hybrid robotic systems. We present a brief overview of the design and structure of the toolbox and validate it by comparing its results with those published in the literature. To highlight the toolbox's potential to efficiently model, simulate, optimize, and control various robotic systems, we demonstrate four sample applications. The demonstrated applications explore different actuator and external loading conditions of single-, branched-, open-, and closed-chain robotic systems. We think that the soft-robotics research community will significantly benefit from the SoRoSim toolbox for a wide variety of applications.