Soft Robotics Modelling and control (TU/e – TT)
The flexibility of soft robots poses challenges on its modelling and control: the models have to be quite accurate to mimic flexible nature of the robots, and at the same time the model complexity can hamper the application of the control design methods; so to find a reasonable trade-off between the model accuracy and its applicability for control is one of the core research questions posed. A flexible structure with embedded transduction is so dissimilar to the regular transducers mounted on stiff robots, that for both the description and understanding of the transducers as well as for their use in soft robotic control schemes, we will have to develop new theoretical and practical (bio-inspired) control frameworks.