Human-centered Control of a Growing Soft Robot for Object Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a user-friendly teleoperation system for a growing soft robot manipulator, combining gesture control and haptic feedback to enable complex object manipulation tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel interface integrating gesture control and haptic feedback for controlling a growing soft robot in complex environments.

Findings

Successful tower-building task demonstration

Effective gesture-based control system

Foundation for shared autonomy future work

Abstract

We present a user-friendly interface to teleoperate a soft robot manipulator in a complex environment. Key components of the system include a manipulator with a grasping end-effector that grows via tip eversion, gesture-based control, and haptic display to the operator for feedback and guidance. In the initial work, the operator uses the soft robot to build a tower of blocks, and future works will extend this to shared autonomy scenarios in which the human operator and robot intelligence are both necessary for task completion.