Step 6: Complete soft gripper

You can download the file associated with this step at: 
http://sofamacbuilder.lille.inria.fr/defrost/scenes/Tutorial/step6-SoftGripper/SoftGripper_directControl.py

In the previous steps, we showed the simulation of a single finger made of elastic material. But the orginal soft gripper robot is composed of three fingers actuated with cables. In the design of Taimoor Hassan et al., a single cable is used for the three fingers. We reproduce it in the simulation,  by applying the same control input to three cable actuators placed on the three fingers
 

In the file SoftGripper_directControl.py, we put 3 finger models by copy/paste of the previous simulation
 

PythonScriptController is placed at the root node of the graph to interactively change the inputs of 3 the CableConstraint components. Here, we use a control of the actuators (direct simulation).

How to use the demo ?

Launch the file SoftGripper_directControl.py on SOFA, click the button Animate  and then press Ctrl + to close the gripper and Ctrl - to open the gripper.

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