Whole arm planning for a soft and highly compliant 2D robotic manipulator

Soft continuum manipulators have the advantage of being more compliant and having more degrees of freedom than rigid redundant manipulators. This attribute should allow soft manipulators to autonomously execute highly dexterous tasks. However, current approaches to motion planning, inverse kinematics, and even design limit the capacity of soft manipulators to take full advantage of their inherent compliance. We provide a computational approach to whole arm planning for a soft planar manipulator that advances the arm's end effector pose in task space while simultaneously considering the arm's entire envelope in proximity to a confined environment. The algorithm solves a series of constrained optimization problems to determine locally optimal inverse kinematics. Due to inherent limitations in modeling the kinematics of a highly compliant soft robot and the local optimality of the planner's solutions, we also rely on the increased softness of our newly designed manipulator to accomplish the whole arm task, namely the arm's ability to harmlessly collide with the environment. We detail the design and fabrication of the new modular manipulator as well as the planner's central algorithm. We experimentally validate our approach by showing that the robotic system is capable of autonomously advancing the soft arm through a pipe-like environment in order to reach distinct goal states.