Control of Fluidic Systems Based on Under-Actuated Damped Architectures: Two Application Examples

Biologic organisms demonstrate that many of their capabilities are related to softness of their body. Recently, soft robotics aims at transferring such capabilities to robots through the use of soft materials. Thanks to the growing interest in compliant materials, hydropneumatics and inflatable system dynamics are attracting renewed attention from their scientific community. This work fits into this emerging field and presents two implementations of an under-actuated approach to dynamic control of pneumatic systems. The first example involves a worm-like robot for pipe inspection, made up of soft and rigid components, while the second one consists in a two-fingered gripper, realized through soft continuum bending actuators. Both these systems are composed of multiple silicone chambers connected in parallel to a single pressure source. It is shown that a proper design of the mechanical properties of the chambers enables to change the dynamic behavior of the overall system by simply modulating the pressurazation rate.