The Physics of Interactions in Soft Robotics

Soft robotics is a relatively young field of robotics that takes advantage of soft materials and compliant structures to improve robot interactions with their surrounding environment and ultimately provide them with enhanced abilities. It is largely grounded on bioinspiration and the soft robotics community is traditionally interdisciplinary. At the base of the use of such a high deformability is the idea of Embodied Intelligence, i.e. how the behaviour emerges from the physical interaction of the body with the environment. The physics of embodied intelligence is then crucial for its effective implementation in soft robotics. In addition to the typical need for modelling the robot deformations as given by actuators, soft robotics needs modelling the external interactions as well, for considering the action of external forces onto the robot deformation and overall movements, in robot control and design. Bioinspired soft robots find diverse applications, as they can access remote areas, confined spaces, even inside the human body, complex or collapsed structures, both in land and at sea. So, a variety of environments with diverse physical characteristics are in play. Marine applications give interesting challenges for bioinspired swimming, locomotion and manipulation underwater, involving fluid-robot interactions. Principles from octopuses and crabs enabled the development of efficient legged robots, walking underwater with emergent self-stabilizing gaits. Likewise, octopuses show unconventional, efficient, grasping and manipulation movements. Soft robotics is enabling robot abilities that were not possible before, like morphing, stiffening, growing, self-healing, evolving. They open up new scenarios, in the direction of more life-like robots. Seeing soft robots as dynamical systems in those environments allows to find emergent behaviours, effective and efficient, in an interdisciplinary dialogue.

NUS start-up Grant (R-265-000-A31-133 and R-265-000-A31-731).