BiPneu: Design and Control of a Bipolar-Pressure Pneumatic System for Soft Robots

TL;DR

BiPneu is a scalable bipolar-pressure pneumatic system for soft robots that uses a hybrid control strategy to achieve accurate, responsive pressure regulation across both polarities, outperforming traditional controllers.

Contribution

The paper introduces BiPneu, a novel bipolar-pressure pneumatic system with a dual-mode sliding-mode controller for improved soft robot actuation.

Findings

DM-SMC achieves lower pressure tracking errors than PID and model predictive controllers.

Experimental results show significant reduction in pressure tracking errors with DM-SMC.

BiPneu enables advanced soft robotic applications like teleoperation and quick maneuvering.

Abstract

Positive-negative pressure regulation is critical to soft robotic actuators, enabling large motion ranges and versatile actuation modes. However, achieving high-performance regulation across both pressure polarities remains challenging due to asymmetric inflation-deflation dynamics, valve nonlinearities, and switching-induced flow disturbances. This paper presents BiPneu, a scalable and cost-efficient multi-channel bipolar-pressure pneumatic system for soft robots that enables wide-range, accurate, and responsive pressure regulation while providing seamless compatibility with high-level software ecosystems. A dual-mode sliding-mode controller (DM-SMC) with hysteresis-supervised mode selection is proposed based on a hybrid electro-pneumatic model. Extensive simulation and experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DM-SMC in tracking step and sinusoidal pressure references compared with both advanced model predictive controllers and well-tuned PID controllers. Experimental results show average absolute errors of 1.44 kPa in multi-step tests and 4.23 kPa in sinusoidal tracking, corresponding to reductions of 11.9% and 35.6% relative to PID control, along with improved control effort, valve switching rate, and transient response. Robustness of DM-SMC is further verified on a bellow actuator with pressure-dependent volume. Finally, BiPneu's capability is demonstrated via two soft robotic examples, quick ball-maneuvering with a soft parallel manipulator and real-time finite element method (FEM)-based teleoperation of a soft bellows actuator.