Morphological design methodologies of soft robots

Abstract

<p>Over the past decade, robots have gradually extended from rigid robots to soft robots regarding the morphology. Because of their good environmental adaptability, dexterous flexibility, and functional characteristics, soft robots have shown good potentials in application scenarios such as special services and biomedical applications. Traditional design methodologies for rigid robots, which typically proceed from functional requirements to mechanism and joints and then to sensing and actuations, are difficult to apply directly to soft robots because of the different materials, morphologies, actuations and control patterns. In contrast, the morphological design of soft robots must consider the properties of soft materials, the continuum-level infinite degrees of freedom, actuation and control patterns, which make the morphological design of soft robots a new and challenging issue. Although studies on soft robots have been frequently reported in recent years, a mature framework of the design methods has not yet been given. Therefore, this survey aims to construct a systematic framework of morphological design methodologies of soft robots. In this survey, existing morphological design methods are divided into two categories, forward design using biomimetic methods and inverse design using morphological computation, and each category is introduced respectively with subcategories. The survey also analyzes the challenges of design of soft robots for new applications. As a perspective, a framework of morphological computation of soft robots for multi-object manipulation or time-varying object interaction is given to provides a reference for design of soft robots with growing applications in special services or biomedical scenarios.</p>