Automatic Generation of Locomotion Patterns for Soft Modular Reconfigurable Robots

Applied Sciences

Yu Zhang¹  Yanhe Zhu¹  Jie Zhao¹  Hegao Cai¹  Xin Sui¹  Dongyang Bie² 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), Harbin 150001, China;The Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information Systems, College of Computer and Control Engineering, and the Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China;

关键词: soft modular robot;    evolutionary computation;    simulation software;    voxcad;   

DOI  :  10.3390/app10010294

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In recent years, soft modular robots have become popular among researchers with the development of soft robotics. However, the absence of a visual 3D simulation platform for soft modular robots hold back the development of the field. The three-dimensional simulation platform plays an important role in the field of multi-body robots. It can shorten the design cycle, reduce costs, and verify the effectiveness of the optimization algorithm expediently. Equally importantly, evolutionary computation is a very effective method for designing the controller of multi-body robots and soft robots with hyper redundancy and large parametric design space. In this paper, a tradeoff between the structural complexity of the soft modular robot and computational power of the simulation software is made. A reconfigurable soft modular robot is designed, and the open-source simulation software VOXCAD is re-developed to simulate the actual soft robot. The evolutionary algorithm is also applied to search for the most efficient motion pattern for an established configuration in VOXCAD, and experiments are conducted to validate the results.

【 授权许可】

Unknown