Prototype of a fish inspired swimming silk robot

Donatelli, Cassandra M.; Bradner, Sarah A.; Mathews, Juanita; Sanders, Erin; Culligan, Casey R.; Kaplan, David L.; Tytell, Eric D.

doi:10.1109/robosoft.2018.8404897

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 36 publications

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“…The body of these robots are structurally constructed using rigid materials such as plastic, metal and glass-fiber (Raj and Thakur, 2016), which consequently increases the rigidity and mass of the robot. To overcome this limitation, over the past demi-decade, researchers have been exploring the usage of soft materials (Lauder et al, 2011) such as silicone rubber/elastomer (Katzschmann et al, 2018), silicone prepolymer (Aubin et al, 2019) and silk hydrogel (Donatelli et al, 2018) to construct the body of the fish robot (Olsen and Kim, 2019). The adoption of such soft materials in the construction of the robotic fish greatly contributes towards mimicking the flexibility of the biological fish body, thus generating a continuous deformation and streamlined displacement of water.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design, Modeling, and Visual Learning-Based Control of Soft Robotic Fish Driven by Super-Coiled Polymers

Rajendran

Zhang

2022

Front. Robot. AI

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A rapidly growing field of aquatic bio-inspired soft robotics takes advantage of the underwater animals’ bio-mechanisms, where its applications are foreseen in a vast domain such as underwater exploration, environmental monitoring, search and rescue, oil-spill detection, etc. Improved maneuverability and locomotion of such robots call for designs with higher level of biomimicry, reduced order of complex modeling due to continuum elastic dynamics, and challenging robust nonlinear controllers. This paper presents a novel design of a soft robotic fish actively actuated by a newly developed kind of artificial muscles—super-coiled polymers (SCP) and passively propelled by a caudal fin. Besides SCP exhibiting several advantages in terms of flexibility, cost and fabrication duration, this design benefits from the SCP’s significantly quicker recovery due to water-based cooling. The soft robotic fish is approximated as a 3-link representation and mathematically modeled from its geometric and dynamic perspectives to constitute the combined system dynamics of the SCP actuators and hydrodynamics of the fish, thus realizing two-dimensional fish-swimming motion. The nonlinear dynamic model of the SCP driven soft robotic fish, ignoring uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics, necessitates the development of robust/intelligent control which serves as the motivation to not only mimic the bio-mechanisms, but also mimic the cognitive abilities of a real fish. Therefore, a learning-based control design is proposed to meet the yaw control objective and study its performance in path following via various swimming patterns. The proposed learning-based control design employs the use of deep-deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) reinforcement learning algorithm to train the agent. To overcome the limitations of sensing the soft robotic fish’s states by designing complex embedded sensors, overhead image-based observations are generated and input to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to deduce the curvature dynamics of the soft robot. A linear quadratic regulator (LQR) based multi-objective reward is proposed to reinforce the learning feedback of the agent during training. The DDPG-based control design is simulated and the corresponding results are presented.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design, Modeling, and Visual Learning-Based Control of Soft Robotic Fish Driven by Super-Coiled Polymers

Rajendran

Zhang

2022

Front. Robot. AI

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Materials, Actuators, and Sensors for Soft Bioinspired Robots

et al. 2020

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This review covers recent advancements in the field of bioinspired soft robotics, with a primary focus on the last 4 years (2017)(2018)(2019)(2020). The review serves as a toolbox for an interdisciplinary audience interested in the most recent bioinspired soft robotic technologies. In particular, it highlights and explores the vital components of soft robots, focusing on the enabling mechanisms and their biological inspirations. The first section discusses the materials used to fabricate soft bio inspired robots. Soft bioinspired actuation and sensing are then discussed, exploring their capabilities and implementation by researchers. Existing challenges and future potentials of bioinspired soft robots are addressed in the concluding remarks. This review provides engineers and scientists with the latest technological advancements and information needed for designing and developing the next generation of soft bioinspired robotic systems. The future applications of these robots will be grand and limitless. Materials Used for Bioinspired Sensors and ActuatorsClassical robotic systems are comprised of rigid bodies, actuators, and sensors. Unfortunately, many of these well-developed actuators and sensors are not transferable to soft bodies. Thus, researchers working in soft robotics need to reinvent actuators and sensors for soft moving bodies. Biological organisms can be an excellent inspiration for designing these soft actuators and sensors, allowing for their integration in both soft and rigid bodies. The design process of soft actuators and sensors have to be initiated with material selection and composition, for they are foundations upon which the actuators and sensors will be built around. Presently, a diversified list of materials has been used in the development of soft robotic systems. This section will cover some of the latest advancements in the last 4 years in the area of material selection and composition for the design and development of soft bioinspired actuators and sensors.During the past 4 years, researchers have produced soft bioinspired actuators and sensors using biological material such as muscle tissue, [23,24] and plant fibers; [25] carbon-based materials such as graphite and graphene oxide (GO) [26][27][28][29][30][31] and carbon nanotubes (CN); [32,33] hydrogel materials such as poly(Nisopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), [34,35] liquid crystal elastomers (LCE), [36] dielectric elastomers (DE), [37] and ionic polymermetal composites (IPMC). [38] An overview of these materials (Figure 1), along with their underlying mechanisms, are discussed below.Biological systems can perform complex tasks with high compliance levels. This makes them a great source of inspiration for soft robotics. Indeed, the union of these fields has brought about bioinspired soft robotics, with hundreds of publications on novel research each year. This review aims to survey fundamental advances in bioinspired soft actuators and sensors with a focus on the progress between 2017 and 2020, providing a primer for the materials used i...

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Centipede bio-extremity elastic model control

Guaderrama

Martínez‐García

2021

J Micro-Bio Robot

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Prototype of a fish inspired swimming silk robot

Cited by 4 publications

References 36 publications

Design, Modeling, and Visual Learning-Based Control of Soft Robotic Fish Driven by Super-Coiled Polymers

Design, Modeling, and Visual Learning-Based Control of Soft Robotic Fish Driven by Super-Coiled Polymers

Materials, Actuators, and Sensors for Soft Bioinspired Robots

Centipede bio-extremity elastic model control

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