To Enabling Plant-like Movement Capabilities in Continuum Arms

Abstract

Enabling reaching capabilities in highly redundant continuum soft arms is an active area of research. So far, it has been heavily addressed through the brain-inspired notion of internal models, where sensory-motor spaces are correlated through learning-based computational frameworks. However, this work investigates an innovative source of bio-inspiration, i.e., plants, which can interestingly move towards a desired external stimulus despite the lack of a central nervous system, thereby, opening avenues to the development of a new generation of distributed control strategies for continuum arms. In particular, reaching is achieved through a combination of distributed sensing and curvature regulation. This work is a first translation of moving-by-growing mechanisms in plants intended to endow continuum and soft robotic arms with a novel repertoire of motions that can be exploited to efficiently navigate highly unstructured environments.