Quasi-Static Control of Discrete Cosserat Rod
This work provides a control framework for soft robots, addressing the challenge of feedback control for continuum manipulators, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods from rigid-link manipulators.
The authors design feedback control laws for soft robots modeled with the Cosserat rod, discretized via the Piecewise Constant Strain approach, enabling trajectory tracking and shape control. Numerical results demonstrate effective performance for end-effector tracking and shape control.
In this paper, we design feedback control laws for soft robots modelled using the Cosserat rod, which is spatially discretised using the Piecewise Constant Strain (PCS) approach. The PCS approach transforms the nonlinear PDEs describing the Cosserat rod to a system of nonlinear ODEs. This simplification results in a model describing soft robots which is similar to the serial rigid-link manipulators. We design feedback control laws for the quasi-static PCS model by using the external end-effector wrench as control input. The control laws are designed based on state-feedback linearisation in strain and task spaces. An extensive set of numerical results demonstrates the performance of the control laws for end-effector trajectory tracking and shape control of soft robots.