Infinite-Dimensional Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematics for Soft Robots via Neural Operators

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Veil, Carina, Flaschel, Moritz, Kuhl, Ellen, Della Santina, Cosimo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Veil, Carina
Flaschel, Moritz
Kuhl, Ellen
Della Santina, Cosimo
author_facet Veil, Carina
Flaschel, Moritz
Kuhl, Ellen
Della Santina, Cosimo
contents For fully actuated rigid robots, kinematic inversion is a purely geometric problem, efficiently solved by closed-loop inverse kinematics (CLIK) schemes that compute joint configurations to position the robot body in space. For underactuated soft robots, however, not all configurations are attainable through control action, making kinematic inversion extremely challenging. Extensions of CLIK address this by introducing end-to-end mappings from actuation to task space for the controller to operate on, but typically assume finite dimensions of the underlying virtual configuration space. In this work, we formulate CLIK in the infinite-dimensional domain to reason about the entire soft robot shape while solving tasks. We do this by composing an actuation-to-shape map with a shape-to-task map, deriving the differential end-to-end kinematics via an infinite-dimensional chain rule, and thereby obtaining a Jacobian-based CLIK algorithm. Since this actuation-to-shape mapping is rarely available in closed form, we propose to learn it using differentiable neural operator networks. We first present an analytical study on a constant-curvature segment, and then apply the neural version of the algorithm to a three-fiber soft robotic arm whose underlying model relies on morphoelasticity and active filament theory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18655
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Infinite-Dimensional Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematics for Soft Robots via Neural Operators
Veil, Carina
Flaschel, Moritz
Kuhl, Ellen
Della Santina, Cosimo
Robotics
Systems and Control
For fully actuated rigid robots, kinematic inversion is a purely geometric problem, efficiently solved by closed-loop inverse kinematics (CLIK) schemes that compute joint configurations to position the robot body in space. For underactuated soft robots, however, not all configurations are attainable through control action, making kinematic inversion extremely challenging. Extensions of CLIK address this by introducing end-to-end mappings from actuation to task space for the controller to operate on, but typically assume finite dimensions of the underlying virtual configuration space. In this work, we formulate CLIK in the infinite-dimensional domain to reason about the entire soft robot shape while solving tasks. We do this by composing an actuation-to-shape map with a shape-to-task map, deriving the differential end-to-end kinematics via an infinite-dimensional chain rule, and thereby obtaining a Jacobian-based CLIK algorithm. Since this actuation-to-shape mapping is rarely available in closed form, we propose to learn it using differentiable neural operator networks. We first present an analytical study on a constant-curvature segment, and then apply the neural version of the algorithm to a three-fiber soft robotic arm whose underlying model relies on morphoelasticity and active filament theory.
title Infinite-Dimensional Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematics for Soft Robots via Neural Operators
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18655