A Compliant Actuation Dynamics Gazebo-ROS Plugin for Effective Simulation of Soft Robotics Systems: Application to CENTAURO Robot

Abstract

Despite the important role of simulation in the development and control of robotics systems, the majority of open source simulation tools has however paid no attention to the progress and paradigm change on the robot design in the past 15 years with the consideration of soft actuation technologies as a mean to power new robotic systems. More specifically, the integration of series elastic actuators (SEAs) into robots modifies significantly the dynamics characteristics of the system while the incorporation of the passive compliance into the actuators is not applied in conventional simulators. This paper introduces a scheme for the implementation of the SEA dynamics on a Gazebo-ROS framework exploited for the simulation of a new centaur-like robot. This approach is based on designing a custom control plugin embodying the passive compliance dynamics so that the controller associated with each joint receives both collocated and non-collocated feedback. A simulation comparison with Matlab validating the performance of the designed control plugin is demonstrated. In the end, a whole-body simulation of the centaur robot driven/controlled by the proposed plugin is presented.

Remote mobile manipulation with the centauro robot: Full‐body telepresence and autonomous operator assistance

“…Having defined the kinematics of the limbs, the required actuation performance for each joint could be derived. To get an estimation of the actuation needs, a series of simulation studies was executed using an initial model of the robot based on estimated rigid body dynamic properties (Kamedula, Kashiri, Caldwell, & Tsagarakis, ). A set of trajectories with different frequencies which explored the overall robot workspace was executed, while carrying a 10 kg payload per arm.…”

An Open-Source ROS-Gazebo Toolbox for Simulating Robots With Compliant Actuators

“…The only way to implement such features is to leverage other software, e.g., Matlab/Simulink, or to use custom plugins. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the only example of the latter solution has been presented in ( Kameduła et al, 2016 ), where the authors developed a custom plugin specifically designed for simulating the SEA joints of a centaur-like platform. However, this solution has been only validated through comparative simulations in Matlab and is limited to the SEAs case, thus it neglects most of the other compliant platforms presented in the literature.…”