A Soft Robot Inverse Kinematics for Virtual Reality

We show how a variety of techniques from Com- puter Graphics can be leveraged to intuitively control the shape (configuration) of arbitrary 3D Soft Robots in VR. Our pipeline, Virtual Reality Soft Robot Inverse Kinematics (VR-Soft IK), overcomes fundamental limitations of general- purpose drag-and-drop soft robot control interfaces by leaving the 2D computer screen for 3D Virtual Reality (VR). VR-Soft IK uses a simulation based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) and a control method based on sensitivity analysis. Additionally, we show that our general control pipeline can be fused with techniques from 3D character animation to skin our simulation with a high-resolution surface mesh, pointing a way toward Mixed Reality Soft Robots. This full Skinned VR-Soft IK pipeline uses skeletal animation and GPU picking. We demonstrate the utility of our pipeline by doing real-time, open-loop control of the real-world 3D soft robotic arm Helix.