Control the Soft Robot Arm with its Physical Twin

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guan, Qinghua, Cheng, Hung Hon, Dai, Benhui, Hughes, Josie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Guan, Qinghua
Cheng, Hung Hon
Dai, Benhui
Hughes, Josie
author_facet Guan, Qinghua
Cheng, Hung Hon
Dai, Benhui
Hughes, Josie
contents To exploit the compliant capabilities of soft robot arms we require controller which can exploit their physical capabilities. Teleoperation, leveraging a human in the loop, is a key step towards achieving more complex control strategies. Whilst teleoperation is widely used for rigid robots, for soft robots we require teleoperation methods where the configuration of the whole body is considered. We propose a method of using an identical 'physical twin', or demonstrator of the robot. This tendon robot can be back-driven, with the tendon lengths providing configuration perception, and enabling a direct mapping of tendon lengths for the execture. We demonstrate how this teleoperation across the entire configuration of the robot enables complex interactions with exploit the envrionment, such as squeezing into gaps. We also show how this method can generalize to robots which are a larger scale that the physical twin, and how, tuneability of the stiffness properties of the physical twin simplify its use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_17227
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Control the Soft Robot Arm with its Physical Twin
Guan, Qinghua
Cheng, Hung Hon
Dai, Benhui
Hughes, Josie
Robotics
To exploit the compliant capabilities of soft robot arms we require controller which can exploit their physical capabilities. Teleoperation, leveraging a human in the loop, is a key step towards achieving more complex control strategies. Whilst teleoperation is widely used for rigid robots, for soft robots we require teleoperation methods where the configuration of the whole body is considered. We propose a method of using an identical 'physical twin', or demonstrator of the robot. This tendon robot can be back-driven, with the tendon lengths providing configuration perception, and enabling a direct mapping of tendon lengths for the execture. We demonstrate how this teleoperation across the entire configuration of the robot enables complex interactions with exploit the envrionment, such as squeezing into gaps. We also show how this method can generalize to robots which are a larger scale that the physical twin, and how, tuneability of the stiffness properties of the physical twin simplify its use.
title Control the Soft Robot Arm with its Physical Twin
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17227