A Novel Approach to Under-Actuated Control of Fluidic Systems

Thanks to the growing interest in soft robotics, hydropneumatics and inflatable system dynamics are attracting renewed attention from the scientific community. Typical fluidic systems are composed of several chambers and require a complex and bulky network of active components for their control. This paper presents a novel approach to fluidic actuation, which consists in the co-design of both the mechanical parameters of the system and of custom input signals, to enable the elicitation of different behaviors of the system with fewer control components. The principle is presented in theory and simulation and then experimentally validated through the application to a case study, an in-pipe inchworm-like robot. It is shown that it is possible to obtain forward and backward movements by modulating a unique input.