Abstract
The increasing trend of studying the innate softness of robotic structures and amalgamating it with the benefits of the extensive developments in the field of embodied intelligence has led to the sprouting of a relatively new yet rewarding sphere of technology in intelligent soft robotics. The fusion of deep reinforcement algorithms with soft bio-inspired structures positively directs to a fruitful prospect of designing completely self-sufficient agents that are capable of learning from observations collected from their environment. For soft robotic structures possessing countless degrees of freedom, it is at times not convenient to formulate mathematical models necessary for training a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent. Deploying current imitation learning algorithms on soft robotic systems has provided competent results. This review article posits an overview of various such algorithms along with instances of being applied to real-world scenarios, yielding frontier results. Brief descriptions highlight the various pristine branches of DRL research in soft robotics.
Highlights
Soft Robotics: A New Surge in RoboticsThe past decade has seen engineering and biology coming together [1,2,3,4,5], leading to cropping up of a relatively newer field of research—Soft Robotics (SoRo)
The need for creating completely autonomous intelligent robotic systems has led to the heavy dependence on the use of Deep reinforcement learning (RL) to solve a set of complex real-world problems without any prior information about the environment
Soft robots having bio-inspired designs that make use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques like the ones listed in the previous sections are known to yield satisfactory results, but still, they face various obstacles that hinder their performance when tested on the real-world problems after being trained on simulation settings
Summary
The past decade has seen engineering and biology coming together [1,2,3,4,5], leading to cropping up of a relatively newer field of research—Soft Robotics (SoRo). SoRo has been enhancing physical potentialities of robotic structures amplifying the flexibility, rigidity and the strength and accelerating their performance. Various underlying physical properties including body shape, elasticity, viscosity, softness, density enable such unconventional structures and morphologies in robotic systems with embodied intelligence. Developing such techniques would certainly lead to fabrication of robots that could invulnerably communicate with the environment. Soft Robots are fabricated from materials that are deformable and possess the pliability and rheological characteristics of biological tissue This fragment of the bio-inspired class of machines represents an interdisciplinary paradigm in engineering capable of aiding human assistance in varied domains of research. These robots have shown promise from being used as wearables for prosthetics to replacing human labor in industries involving large-scale manipulation and autonomous navigation
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