Short description
This internship proposal concerns students from second year of master interested by software development and robotics. It will be asked to implement a link between the framework SOFA which is used by the team to model and simulate the deformable robots in their environment and Matlab which is a numerical computing environment and a programing language often used in robotic control. With this coupling between SOFA and MATLAB, we wish to simplify the design of control methods for soft-robots. This internship will go from analysis of the needs to a concrete implementation.
Key Words : C/C++, Matlab, Modélisation, Contrôle, Systèmes embarqués.
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:
– Outstanding level in C/C++
– Good knowledge of MATLAB
– Software design
– Interest for robotics and control problems
– Teamwork
Schedule
1. Understand the needs, write specifications.
2. Writing the specification and architecture proposal
3. Implementation of a prototype in C/C++
4. Evaluation with a design of a control law on a deformable manipulator
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
