Bootstrapping the Dynamic Gait Controller of the Soft Robot Arm

In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic gait controller for the repetitive behavior of soft robot manipula- tors performing routine tasks. Compliance with soft robots is advantageous when the robot interacts with living organisms and other fragile objects. However, predicting and controlling repetitive behavior is challenging because of hysteresis and non-linear dynamics governing the interactions. Existing prior- free methods track the dynamic state using recurrent neural networks or rely on known generalized coordinates describing the robot’s state. We propose to model the interaction induced by the repetitive behavior as gait dynamics and represent the dynamic state with Central Pattern Generator (CPG) tracking the motion phase and thus reduce the complexity of the robot’s forward model. The proposed method bootstraps an ensemble of the forward models exploring multiple dynamic contexts that are expanded as it searches for repetitive motion producing the target repetitive behavior. The proposed approach is experi- mentally validated on a pneumatically actuated soft robot arm I-Support, where the method infers gaits for different targets.