Cosserat-Rod Based Dynamic Modeling of Soft Slender Robot Interacting with Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlinear dynamic model for soft slender robots based on Cosserat rod theory, effectively handling contact and friction interactions with the environment in real time.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Cosserat-rod based dynamic modeling approach that incorporates smoothed contact and friction constraints for soft robots interacting with complex environments.

Findings

Model accurately predicts deformation and contact forces.

Enables real-time simulation of soft robot-environment interactions.

Validated through experiments with rigid and soft bodies.

Abstract

Soft slender robots have attracted more and more research attentions in these years due to their continuity and compliance natures. However, mechanics modeling for soft robots interacting with environment is still an academic challenge because of the non-linearity of deformation and the non-smooth property of the contacts. In this work, starting from a piece-wise local strain field assumption, we propose a nonlinear dynamic model for soft robot via Cosserat rod theory using Newtonian mechanics which handles the frictional contact with environment and transfer them into the nonlinear complementary constraint (NCP) formulation. Moreover, we smooth both the contact and friction constraints in order to convert the inequality equations of NCP to the smooth equality equations. The proposed model allows us to compute the dynamic deformation and frictional contact force under common optimization framework in real time when the soft slender robot interacts with other rigid or soft bodies. In the end, the corresponding experiments are carried out which valid our proposed dynamic model.