A Hybrid Control Approach for a Pneumatic-Actuated Soft Robot
Emilio Tavio y Cabrera (Student TU Delft)
C. Santina (TU Delft - Learning & Autonomous Control, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR))
Pablo Borja (Plymouth University)
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Abstract
The compliant nature of soft robots is appealing to a wide range of applications. However, this compliant property also poses several control challenges, e.g., how to deal with infinite degrees of freedom and highly nonlinear behaviors. This paper proposes a hybrid controller for a pneumatic-actuated soft robot. To this end, a model-based feedforward controller is designed and combined with a correction torque calculated via Gaussian process regression. Then, the proposed model-based and hybrid controllers are experimentally validated, and a detailed comparison between controllers is presented. Notably, the experimental results highlight the potential benefits of adding a learning approach to a model-based controller to enhance the closed-loop performance while reducing the computational load exhibited by purely learning strategies.