Internship proposal: Actuators control for soft-robots [CLOSED]

Short description

This internship proposal concerns students from first or second year of master interested on control solution developements. The intern will be asked to design control solutions of actuators for the specific needs of soft robots. This solution will be implemented on a real robot using an embeded calculator (arduino, rapsberry, …)

Key Words : Modeling, Identification, Control, Estimation, Embeded system.

Context

The DEFROST team works on issues related to deformable robots, from their design to their control.
A deformable robot is a robot composed of deformable structures, which behaves by deforming. Their design is often inspired by the mechanical properties of living organisms [Kim et al 2013]. These deformable robots have the advantage of being inexpensive to manufacture, robust and less dangerous in the context of interaction with humans. This new branch of robotics opens many prospects of applications.

Thanks to research done with the simulation platform SOFA [Faure et al 2012], we are now able to simulate, in real-time, the physical model of these robots. The team recently developed an algorithm allowing their control through an inverse simulation [Duriez 2013],[Largilliere et al. 2015].
This algorithm computes the actions (forces, pressure, displacement…) to be applied on the robot to reach its goal. The actuators have to be controled to apply these actions with a high precision.

Profile

Expected skills are:
– Modeling/identification: State space representation, Frequency response identification, Mean square algorithm.
– Control design: Linear state feedback techniques or linear transfer function based techniques.
– Control design softwares: Matlab, Scilab or Octave.
– Programming: C/C++ programmation language or Labview.
– Microcontrollers: PWM, communication buses.
– Teamwork

Schedule

1. Understand the needs, write specifications.
2. Modeling/Identification of several actuators.
3. Control design.
4. Implementation on rapid prototyping device and validation.
5. Implementation on low cost device.

References

[Duriez 2013] Christian Duriez, _Control of Elastic Soft Robots based on Real-Time Finite Element Method_. ICRA 2013 (https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00823766)

[Faure et al 2012] François Faure, Christian Duriez, Hervé Delingette, Jérémie Allard, Benjamin Gilles, et al.. _SOFA: A Multi-Model Framework for Interactive Physical Simulation_. Soft Tissue Biomechanical Modeling for Computer Assisted Surgery 2012 (https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00681539)

[Largillière et al. 2015] Frederick Largilliere, Valerian Verona, Eulalie Coevoet, Mario Sanz-Lopez, Jeremie Dequidt, Christian Duriez. _Real-time Control of Soft-Robots using Asynchronous Finite Element Modeling_. ICRA 2015

[Kim et al 2013] Sangbae Kim, Cecilia Laschi and Barry Trimmer, _Soft robotics: a bioinspired evolution in robotics_. Trends in biotechnology, 2013

Contacts

– Alexandre Kruszewski : alexandre.kruszewski@ec-lille.fr
– Christian Duriez : christian.duriez@inria.fr

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