Model Based Control of Soft Robots: A Survey of the State of the Art and Open Challenges
It provides a foundational overview for researchers in robotics and control theory, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge rather than presenting new methods.
This survey addresses the challenge of controlling continuum soft robots by introducing a unified framework and language to consolidate existing research and identify intrinsic limitations, aiming to lower barriers for control theorists entering the field.
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a monkey's tail). This work aims to introduce the control theorist perspective to this novel development in robotics. We aim to remove the barriers to entry into this field by presenting existing results and future challenges using a unified language and within a coherent framework. Indeed, the main difficulty in entering this field is the wide variability of terminology and scientific backgrounds, making it quite hard to acquire a comprehensive view on the topic. Another limiting factor is that it is not obvious where to draw a clear line between the limitations imposed by the technology not being mature yet and the challenges intrinsic to this class of robots. In this work, we argue that the intrinsic effects are the continuum or multi-body dynamics, the presence of a non-negligible elastic potential field, and the variability in sensing and actuation strategies.