Towards a Modular Framework for Visco-Hyperelastic Simulations of Soft Material Manipulators with Well-Parameterised Material

Abstract

Controller design for continuum robots maintains to be a difficult task. Testing controllers requires dedicated work in manufacturing and investment into hardware as well as software, to acquire a test bench capable of performing dynamic control tasks. Typically, proprietary software for practical controller design such as Matlab/Simulink is used but lacks specific implementations of soft material robots. This intermediate work presents the results of a toolchain to derive well-identified rod simulations. State-of-the-art methods to simulate the dynamics of continuum robots are integrated into an object-oriented implementation and wrapped into the Simulink framework. The generated S-function is capable of handling arbitrary, user-defined input such as pressure actuation or external tip forces as demonstrated in numerical examples. With application to a soft pneumatic actuator, stiffness parameters of a nonlinear hyperelastic material law are identified via finite element simulation and paired with heuristically identified damping parameters to perform dynamic simulation. To prove the general functionality of the simulation, a numerical example as well as a benchmark from literature is implemented and shown. A soft pneumatic actuator is used to generate validation data, which is in good accordance with the respective simulation output. The tool is provided as an open-source project. Code is available under https://gitlab.com/soft_material_robotics/cosserat-rod-simulink-sfunction.© 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works