Control of a Soft Inchworm Robot With Environment Adaptation

Abstract

Soft robots have recently evoked extensive attention because of their abilities to work effectively in unstructured environments. As an actuation technology of soft robots, dielectric elastomers (DEs) exhibit many intriguing attributes such as large strain and high energy density. This paper presents a novel, DE-based, soft crawling robot inspired by inchworms. The kinematics of the soft crawling robot is explored, and a data-driven model is developed to facilitate the controller design. The overall controller incorporates a feedforward controller, a feedback controller, and a disturbance observer (DOB). The feedback controller and the DOB will compensate the disturbance and model uncertainties resulting from the obtained dynamic model and ensure robust performance of the robot under different conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified using experiments on surfaces made of different materials and with inclined angles.