Co-design of feedback control and soft morphology for in-hand manipulation

与传统的“硬”机器人技术相比，软材料机器人技术具有重要的优势。软机器人的行为并不完全是控制命令的结果，就像硬机器人的情况一样。相反，行为还取决于机器人的形状和材料属性，即机器人的形态。当软机器人接触到它们的环境时，它们会变形，隐含地执行控制、感知和驱动等方面的工作。因此，巧妙的形态设计有利于影响机器人的行为，同时简化了控制和感知。在许多系统和应用中，从游泳机器人到飞行机器人，从抓取到运动，都证明了适当的形态设计的好处。然而，软机器人的编程在很大程度上仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。对于硬机器人，编程意味着驱动命令的规范，而对于软机器人，我们必须对控制进行编程，并对机器人的形态进行“编程”，以充分利用软材料机器人提供的优势。当然，这两个问题是密切相关的。因此，我们谈到一个共同设计问题：我们必须一起确定控制和形态，以确定系统的行为。这个问题的现有解决方案包括凭直觉和试错法设计的解决方案实例。为了让软材料机器人作为一个领域成熟起来，我们必须发展对这一新的设计过程的理解，并推导出在问题之间转移的设计指南。在这个建议中，我们将在手持操作的背景下映射反馈控制和形态设计的设计空间。成功的手部操作需要手和物体之间有许多接触点，这导致了对控制、传感和形态的巨大需求。因此，我们将能够在一个简单的实验设置中解决许多设计挑战，并提供即时和清晰的性能反馈。在手操作的领域内，我们将获得对联合设计空间的理解，我们将开发支持设计过程的计算工具和硬件组件，我们将获得可转移到软材料机器人的其他应用的概括性设计见解。

Soft material robotics offers important advantages over over traditional, "hard" robotics. The behavior of a soft robot is not exclusively the result of control commands, as is the case for hard robots. Instead, behavior is also determined by the robot's shape and material properties, i.e. the robot's morphology. As a soft robots come into contact with their environment, they deform, implicitly performing aspects of control, sensing, and actuation. Clever morphological design therefore favorably affects the robot's behavior while at the same time simplifying control and sensing. The benefits of appropriate morphological design have been demonstrated in many systems and applications, ranging from swimming robots to flying robots and from grasping to locomotion.The "programming" of soft robots, however, remains largely an open problem. Whereas for hard robots, programming meant the specification of actuation commands, in the case of soft robots we must program control as well as "program" the robot's morphology to fully leverage the advantages afforded by soft material robotics. And, of course, these two problems interact very closely. We therefore speak of a co-design problem: we must determine control and morphology together to determine the behavior of a system. Existing solutions to this problem consist of solution instances designed by intuition and trial-and-error. For soft material robotics to mature as a field, we must develop an understanding of this novel design process and derive design guidelines that transfer between problems.In this proposal, we will map the design space of feedback control and morphological design in the context of in-hand manipulation. Successful in-hand manipulation requires many contact points between hand and object, leading to significant demands on control, sensing, and morphology. We will therefore be able to address many design challenges in a simple experimental setup with immediate and clear performance feedback. Within the domain of in-hand manipulation, we will derive an understanding of the co-design space, we will develop computational tools and hardware components to support the design process, and we will derive generalizable design insights that can transfer to other application of soft material robotics.