EFRI C3 SoRo: Muscle-like Cellular Architectures and Compliant, Distributed Sensing and Control for Soft Robots

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This project will create a systematic and scalable approach to the design and construction of soft robots. Soft robots have many potential advantages over traditional rigid robots, such as being able to interact safely with people and their surroundings. This project will accelerate the deployment of practical soft robots by exploring modular configurations inspired by natural muscles. Muscular structures can achieve extraordinary feats of dexterity and manipulation even in the absence of a rigid skeleton, with elephant trunks, cephalopod tentacles, and mammalian tongues as prominent examples. Biological muscles operate with hundreds to thousands of individual actuating units and multiple channels for sensing. This research will take inspiration from the structure of biological muscle to construct dexterous, flexible and highly controllable actuators, with distributed sensing, computation, and communication integrated throughout. This project draws inspiration from biology for the investigation and development of a new class of soft robots that are modular and hierarchically arranged. Soft, muscle-cell-like units will be developed that can be inexpensively fabricated at a range of sizes, and implemented en masse to produce customized compliant and continuum robotic structures. Methods will be explored to utilize simple linear actuators to produce complex spatial deformation. Implementation of passive stiffening elements, such as fibers, throughout the soft structures will be evaluated for improving output motion and stiffness relative to what can be produced by the soft structure and actuators alone. The research team will also investigate sensing, power, and control of these systems through the development of electric and magnetic field-based sensors that obviate the need for extensive wiring. Finally, the research team will investigate the modeling and control of the soft, muscle-like structures in order to enable effective planning and execution of mechanically complex manipulation and locomotion tasks. The proposed new approaches for wireless power, sensing, and control of soft robots have the potential to be broadly applicable to many soft robotic architectures and to change the approaches commonly utilized in the field.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.