Design, Modelling and Control of Hybrid Kinematic Soft Robots

This work develops methods for locomotion control of pneumatically operated, mobile soft robots by using a gecko-inspired walking robot as an example. Locomotion control requires the interaction of control hardware, airpressure/deformation controllers and inverse kinematics control algorithms. A minor part of this work develops a pneumatic control box and methods for sensing the deformation of soft bending actuators. The major part of this work is related to the generation of the joint set points for successful locomotion. By specically exploiting the elastic behaviour of the soft material, a comparatively high manoeuvrability is achieved. Using the presented methods, the gecko-inspired robot outperforms most of existing pneumatic-driven, mobile soft robots.