Starting with the SoftRobots plugin & SOFA

Our contribution is relying on the SOFA framework (www.sofa-framework.org). SOFA is an open-source project dedicated to real-time simulation of soft tissues for medical simulation that implements a wide range of mechanical models as well as numerical solvers and associated tools. As our approach requires precise mechanical modeling of the soft robots we implement it as SOFA plugin called SoftRobots.

SOFA is a rather complex piece of software to install but we provide a virtual machine image that embeds a version of the software ready for use. The image can then be executed on operating systems like Windows, MacOS and Linux with free tools such as VirtualBox.

Download & Install

Minimal specification: 2.5 GB of free space on your hard drive, 2 GB of RAM and a multi-core CPU.

To download the plugin, follow the instructions on the webpage here: https://project.inria.fr/softrobot/install-get-started-2/download/

Then to build the files, follow the link associated with the platform you are using:

Once you have created and built the framework files you can start modelling. Check out the tutorials provided.

For more information about SOFA, you can read: "SOFA: A Multi-Model Framework for Interactive Physical Simulation" (https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00681539).

Bibliography

Duriez et al. (2013) Control of Elastic Soft Robotics based on Real-Time Finite Element Method

Faure et al. (2012) SOFA: A Multi-Model Framework for Interactive Physical Simulation

Largillière et al. (2015) Real-time Control of Soft-Robots using Asynchronous Finite Element Modeling

Manti et al. (2015) An Under-Actuated and Adaptable Soft Robotic Gripper

Hassan et al. (2015) Design and development of a bio-inspired, under-actuated soft gripper

Bosman et al. (2015) Domain decomposition approach for FEM quasistatic modeling and control of Continuum Robots with rigid vertebras

Contributors

Christian Duriez