Geometrically-Exact Inverse Kinematic Control of Soft Manipulators with General Threadlike Actuators' Routing

The inverse kinematic control of soft robots appears as an open challenge that has been the subject of a number of letters presented in the last decade. Some solutions have been provided based on specific assumptions on the robot's shape or the actuation mechanism. Other more generic approaches are characterized by a significant computational cost or by a low level of accuracy for very high deformations. In the effort to overcome some of these limitations, here we present a Geometrically-Exact (GE) inverse kinematics controller, which can be applied to soft manipulators having general threadlike actuators' routing. Being GE, the approach is suitable to applications involving arbitrarily large bending and twisting, and, on the other side, it relies on a reduced number of Degrees of Freedom (DOFs). We prove the feasibility of the proposed Jacobian-based inverse kinematic control in simulation for soft manipulators with complex and discontinuous actuators' routing.