Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Pagliocca, Nicholas, Koohbor, Behrad, Trkov, Mitja
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23623
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911182047150080
author Pagliocca, Nicholas
Koohbor, Behrad
Trkov, Mitja
author_facet Pagliocca, Nicholas
Koohbor, Behrad
Trkov, Mitja
contents Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback control for practical applications, it becomes increasingly important to define what safety means and to characterize how soft robots can become unsafe. The unifying theme of soft robotics is to achieve useful functionality through deformation. Consequently, limitations in constitutive model accuracy and risks of material failure are inherent to all soft robots and pose a key challenge in designing provably safe controllers. This work introduces a formal definition of material safety based on strain energy functions and provides a controller that enforces it. We characterize safe and unsafe sets of an incompressible hyperelastic material and demonstrate that safety can be enforced using a high-order control barrier function (HOCBF) with quadratic program-based feedback control. As a case study, we consider a pressurized hyperelastic tube with inertial effects, first-order viscous effects, and full-state feedback. Simulation results verify that the proposed methodology can enforce the material safety specification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23623
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Encoding Material Safety using Control Barrier Functions for Soft Actuator Control
Pagliocca, Nicholas
Koohbor, Behrad
Trkov, Mitja
Robotics
Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback control for practical applications, it becomes increasingly important to define what safety means and to characterize how soft robots can become unsafe. The unifying theme of soft robotics is to achieve useful functionality through deformation. Consequently, limitations in constitutive model accuracy and risks of material failure are inherent to all soft robots and pose a key challenge in designing provably safe controllers. This work introduces a formal definition of material safety based on strain energy functions and provides a controller that enforces it. We characterize safe and unsafe sets of an incompressible hyperelastic material and demonstrate that safety can be enforced using a high-order control barrier function (HOCBF) with quadratic program-based feedback control. As a case study, we consider a pressurized hyperelastic tube with inertial effects, first-order viscous effects, and full-state feedback. Simulation results verify that the proposed methodology can enforce the material safety specification.
title Encoding Material Safety using Control Barrier Functions for Soft Actuator Control
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23623