Task-Mediated Design: A latent space for dexterous soft robotic design

Abstract

Soft robotics has created a paradigm shift within robotic grasping and manipulation. Rather than using complex control policies and path planning methods to undertake grasp objects, soft robots use their embodied intelligence to deform around an object and securely hold it. Yet despite major advances in the field in recent years, there remains an absence of practical methods for designing new high performing soft manipulators. In this perspective, we propose a novel task-mediated approach to soft manipulator design and discuss its application to robust and dexterous manipulation. The task-mediated approach first abstracts the manipulation task into a characteristics latent space, then designs a soft robot to minimise the distance between the actual performance and characteristic latent variables. In conjunction with state-of-the-art generative design tools and simulators, this approach can accelerate the development of bespoke and general purpose manipulators