Abstract
In recent years, soft modular robots have become popular among researchers with the development of soft robotics. However, the absence of a visual 3D simulation platform for soft modular robots hold back the development of the field. The three-dimensional simulation platform plays an important role in the field of multi-body robots. It can shorten the design cycle, reduce costs, and verify the effectiveness of the optimization algorithm expediently. Equally importantly, evolutionary computation is a very effective method for designing the controller of multi-body robots and soft robots with hyper redundancy and large parametric design space. In this paper, a tradeoff between the structural complexity of the soft modular robot and computational power of the simulation software is made. A reconfigurable soft modular robot is designed, and the open-source simulation software VOXCAD is re-developed to simulate the actual soft robot. The evolutionary algorithm is also applied to search for the most efficient motion pattern for an established configuration in VOXCAD, and experiments are conducted to validate the results.
Highlights
Modular reconfigurable robots (MRR) consist of several uniform modular units
The inflating and deflating period of the soft module was set to 2 s, and we set the period of expansion and contraction of the voxels to 2 s in the simulation software
VOXCAD can be used to simulate the locomotion of the actual soft modular robot to a certain extent, and the optimization algorithms can be integrated to realize the off-line optimization of the locomotion patterns of the soft modular robot
Summary
Modular reconfigurable robots (MRR) consist of several uniform modular units. Soft robots are made of soft material, such as silica gel, hydrogel, EAP, and SMP. They have infinite degrees of freedom due to the special characteristics of the soft material, which makes soft robots able to make continuous and large deformation beyond their own scale, and pass through narrow spaces smaller than their own scale. Researchers have applied the concept of modularization to the field of soft robots since Onal and Rus [1,2] put forward soft modular robots for the first time. Vergara et al [2] simulated cell migration, delamination, involution, and even simple self-reconfiguration using a simple pneumatic cubic soft module. Morin et al [3,4] designed a kind of pneumatic cubic which has six surfaces with different patterns and materials, so that different shapes can be formed when inflated and a variety of functions can be achieved when combining several cubic modules
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