Biography
Biography: Christian Duriez
Abstract
Soft robotics is bringing a renewal of robot design: future robots will no longer be rigid, but made of complex deformable structures, composed of stiff and soft regions, close to organic materials that we can find in the nature. Soft robotics opens attractive perspectives in terms of mechatronic integration of smart soft materials, new applications, and reduction of manufacturing costs, robustness, efficiency and security. It could constitute a great jump in robotics in the following years, with applications in surgery, medicine, domestic robotics, game, arts. But traditional control methods do not fully apply to such robots, which are theoretically composed of an infinite number of degrees of freedom. New control strategies and models need to be found. Our team has recently focused on providing numerical methods and software support to reach the real time constraint needed by robotic systems. We have demonstrated that we can use finite element method (FEM) to compute deformations in real-time, in order to capture the behavior of these soft robots. We can also simulate their interaction with their environment, and in particular to anticipate the additional deformations created by the contact with the obstacles. Finally, in soft-robotics, sensing, actuation and motion are coupled by the deformations. We have proposed new strategies in which the deformable models are placed at the heart of the control algorithm design. This presentation will also include some demonstrations and will outline some application perspectives of these soft robots.