A Fast and Model Based Approach for Evaluating Task-Competence of Antagonistic Continuum Arms

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fan, Bill, Roulier, Jacob, Olson, Gina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908691953876992
author Fan, Bill
Roulier, Jacob
Olson, Gina
author_facet Fan, Bill
Roulier, Jacob
Olson, Gina
contents Soft robot arms have made significant progress towards completing human-scale tasks, but designing arms for tasks with specific load and workspace requirements remains difficult. A key challenge is the lack of model-based design tools, forcing advancement to occur through empirical iteration and observation. Existing models are focused on control and rely on parameter fits, which means they cannot provide general conclusions about the mapping between design and performance or the influence of factors outside the fitting data.As a first step toward model-based design tools, we introduce a novel method of analyzing whether a proposed arm design can complete desired tasks. Our method is informative, interpretable, and fast; it provides novel metrics for quantifying a proposed arm design's ability to perform a task, it yields a graphical interpretation of performance through segment forces, and computing it is over 80x faster than optimization based methods.Our formulation focuses on antagonistic, pneumatically-driven soft arms. We demonstrate our approach through example analysis, and also through consideration of antagonistic vs non-antagonistic designs. Our method enables fast, direct and task-specific comparison of these two architectures, and provides a new visualization of the comparative mechanics. While only a first step, the proposed approach will support advancement of model-based design tools, leading to highly capable soft arms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00241
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Fast and Model Based Approach for Evaluating Task-Competence of Antagonistic Continuum Arms
Fan, Bill
Roulier, Jacob
Olson, Gina
Robotics
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Soft robot arms have made significant progress towards completing human-scale tasks, but designing arms for tasks with specific load and workspace requirements remains difficult. A key challenge is the lack of model-based design tools, forcing advancement to occur through empirical iteration and observation. Existing models are focused on control and rely on parameter fits, which means they cannot provide general conclusions about the mapping between design and performance or the influence of factors outside the fitting data.As a first step toward model-based design tools, we introduce a novel method of analyzing whether a proposed arm design can complete desired tasks. Our method is informative, interpretable, and fast; it provides novel metrics for quantifying a proposed arm design's ability to perform a task, it yields a graphical interpretation of performance through segment forces, and computing it is over 80x faster than optimization based methods.Our formulation focuses on antagonistic, pneumatically-driven soft arms. We demonstrate our approach through example analysis, and also through consideration of antagonistic vs non-antagonistic designs. Our method enables fast, direct and task-specific comparison of these two architectures, and provides a new visualization of the comparative mechanics. While only a first step, the proposed approach will support advancement of model-based design tools, leading to highly capable soft arms.
title A Fast and Model Based Approach for Evaluating Task-Competence of Antagonistic Continuum Arms
topic Robotics
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00241