Coordinated Soft Robot Multi-Arm Manipulation

Although, the compliance of soft robots makes them difficult to control accurately, it also potentially provides an inherently safer solution for coordinated multi-arm manipulation tasks. This is particularly true since deviations in end effector pose do not result in large force buildup in the arms or in the object being manipulated. Coordinated, multi-arm manipulation with soft robots is the goal of the research in this paper. In order to enable this we first develop an evolutionary optimization algorithm to determine the initial placement of each arm for a multi-arm task. We then demonstrate the utility of this optimization in simulation. Lastly, we demonstrate a simple multi-arm control scheme on real soft robots using one soft robot arm, and one rigid robot with low-impedance torque control to manipulate an object through two desired trajectories.