Scientific day

Morning (9h00-12h30):

9h: accueil
9h45: Christian Duriez,
opening word
10h00-11h00: Keynote Ian Walker, Clemson University,
"Continuum Robots Across Different Scales",
This talk will focus on the scalability of continuous backbone "continuum" robots. Using historical examples of soft and continuum robots, the ability to create and deploy such robots at large scales (significantly larger than human limbs) will be discussed. Case studies of natural structures will be used to underline the potential of hybrid soft/hard robotic structures at larger scales.

11h00-11h30: Quentin Boehler, MSRL-ETHZ, Zürich,
"Soft magnetic robots in medicine"
The last decade has seen an increasing interest in the use of magnetic actuation to steer tethered and untethered robots within the human body. This technology essentially relies on the generation of magnetic fields with an electromagnetic navigation system to control structures composed of hard or soft magnetic material. This actuation principle is particularly promising to remotely control the deformation of soft devices, such as continuum robots, for biomedical applications with increased safety and dexterity. Our group has been investigating several medical applications that will benefit from this approach. These works are performed in close collaboration with medical experts, and include electrode placement for deep brain stimulation, radiofrequency cardiac ablation and vitreoretinal surgery.

11h30-12h00: Rochdi Merzouki, CRIStAL, Lille,
"Towards Cooperative Soft Robots: Manufacturing and Healthcare applications"
Today, different types of robotic systems are in use or under development for different purposes. Among them, we can cite continuum manipulators. One important goal is to use these robots at home or in industry. For this reason, new concept of manipulators are designed, often inspired from the nature and built with soft materials and smart sensors. The performance of these robots should assist elder people in eating, drinking, compliant grasping tasks etc. For such application, it is needed to develop a class of robot arms with medium performances, in terms of speed and accuracy, comparing to professional arms with rigid bodies and toys arms, but with reasonable cost-effective. Development of lightweight robot arm should integrate for their design: a mechanical structure made by rapid manufacturing, a low cost and efficient multi-domain actuators with wire-potentiometer sensors, bionic and compliant gripper, and mainly an accurate control.
12h00-12h30: Olivier Piccin, AVR-ICUBE, Strasbourg,
"Design of a Soft Origami-Inspired Pneumatic Actuator"
Fluidic actuation combined with soft structures offers interesting possibilities for developing robotic devices for applications where human-robot interactions are required. The design of a soft origami-inspired pneumatic actuator is presented. Prototypes of the actuator have been obtained using multi-material additive manufacturing and their force/displacement characteristics have been assessed. The proposed architecture principle can be used as an elementary building-block that can generate translational or RCM motions.

Lunch time (12h30-14h00):

On-site lunch and demos

Afternoon (14h00-16h30):

14h00-15h00: Keynote of Kaspar Althoefer, Queen Mary University of London,
" Soft Robots for Minimally Invasive Surgery and other human-robot interaction applications: Advancements and Experiences"
15h00-15h30: Kanty Rabenorosoa, FEMTO-ST, Besançon,
"Development of soft robots at small scales »
The development of small scales robotics is a challenging field of robotics. Indeed, there are no traditional mechatronics components, such as mechanisms, actuators, sensors, and controllers available. Recently, soft and active matter have started entering the field of small-scales robotics. In this presentation, conducting polymer-based robots are investigating in order to benefit large deformation and flexibility with possibility to downscale. Our recent results on soft continuum robots and self-folding origami will be presented.
15h30-16h00: Frédéric Boyer, LS2N, Nantes,
"Forward dynamics of cosserat Rods for Continuum robots: a strain parameterization based approach"
In this talk we present a new solution to the forward dynamics of Cosserat beams with in perspective, its application to continuum and soft robotics manipulation and locomotion. In contrast to any approach based on the parametrization of the beam shape with a field of absolute transformations, it is based on the non-linear parametrization of the beam shape by its strain fields and their discretization on a functional basis of strain modes. While remaining geometrically exact, the approach provides a minimal set of ordinary differential equations in the Lagrange matrix form that can be used for control an simulated with standard explicit time-integrators. Inspired from rigid robotics, the calculation of the matrices of the Lagrange model is performed with a continuous inverse Newton-Euler algorithm. The approach is tested on several benches of non-linear structural statics and dynamics, as well as further examples illustrating its capabilities.
16h00-16h30: Christian Duriez, CRIStAL, Lille,
"Physics-based modeling of deformable robots for real-time simulation and control"

Continuum mechanics provide accurate mechanical models for deformable solids. Numerical tools, like the Finite Element Methods (FEM), solve the partial differential equations with the major drawback of being time consuming. This presentation will show that there are some solutions to make FEM models fast enough to be compatible with real-time simulation and control methods, that can be also mixed with learning approach. For soft robotics, this provides a very powerful tool to help the design and the control, in particular for complex interaction with the environment. We will also show that this work can be mixed with more standard articulated and rigid models. Finally we will present quickly our software platform and the performance of this approach for modeling, simulation and control of soft-robots.

Online user: 10