Tutorial: making a soft gripper

You can find more tutorial files listed here: https://project.inria.fr/softrobot/install-get-started-2/tutorial/

In this tutorial, we will see how to use our framework to create and use a mechanical simulation of a soft robot. As an example, we choose to model the soft gripper made by Taimoor Hassan and his co-authors in [Manti et al. 15] and [Hassan et al. 15]. As visible in the picture, the soft gripper is a “single actuator for three fingers" system made of a soft material. The use of a naturally compliant material facilitates object pretension.

Our approach attempts to provide a precise mechanical modeling of the simulated robot. This includes the geometry of its different parts as well as its deformation law and the associated properties. In this tutorial, we assume these are known and simply need to be added into our simulation framework.   

This video is presenting all the different steps of the tutorial:
 

We would like to thank Taimoor Hassan and his co-authors for letting us use their robot design in this tutorial.

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