Physics-based simulation of hyperelastic soft robot motion

The increasing use and development of compliant and hyperelastic materials has led to the the growth of the field of soft robotics. While standard robots are designed to be rigid and stiff, soft robots are usually composed of highly compliant materials such as rubbers, gels, or other elastomers. These unique materials allow soft robots to realistically mimic biological structures, and interact with the word in a way that more closely resembles living organisms. Although soft robots lack the precision and power comparable to more traditional robots, they have shown great promise in the fields of human-robot interaction, wearable robotics, biomedical robotics, and humanoid robotics. However, soft robots are not without drawbacks. One major disadvantage of soft robots is that they are difficult to model and control due to their compliance, nonlinear stress-strain behavior, and complex dynamics. In order to move beyond simple and inaccurate analytical models of soft robots, more complex physics-based simulations must be used. In order to perform physics based simulations with real predictive power, this thesis presents an open-source finite element software package based off of Idaho National Lab's Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE). This custom MOOSE based package, is used to simulate both the static and dynamic deformations of soft robots under a variety of static and dynamic loading conditions. The simulated results are then compared against experimental ones in order to verify the accuracy and utility of this approach. Taken together, the results presented in this thesis represent an important step towards the development of powerful open-source soft robotic modeling, simulation and control platform.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Wandke, Kevin E

Contributors dc:contributor

• Zhang, Yang

• Soft Robotics
• Physics-Based Simulation
• MOOSE

Statement dc:rights

• N/A

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115790

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115790