Soft Robots Modeling: a Structured Overview

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive structured review of the diverse modeling approaches for soft robots, highlighting their theoretical foundations, numerical methods, and practical applicability to aid researchers in understanding and selecting appropriate techniques.

Contribution

It offers the first complete, classification-based overview of soft robot modeling approaches, critically analyzing their theoretical and numerical aspects.

Findings

Provides a structured classification of modeling approaches

Analyzes the applicability of different modeling techniques

Facilitates understanding of theoretical and numerical foundations

Abstract

The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to the modeling of soft robots, often leveraging on other scientific disciplines, such as continuum mechanics, computational mechanics and computer graphics. These theoretical and computational foundations are often taken for granted and this leads to an intricate literature that, consequently, has rarely been the subject of a complete review. For the first time, we present here a structured overview of all the approaches proposed so far to model soft robots. The chosen classification, which is based on their theoretical and numerical grounds, allows us to provide a critical analysis about their uses and applicability. This will enable robotics researchers to learn the basics of these modeling techniques and their associated numerical methods, but also to have a critical perspective on their uses.