A Soft Robot Inverse Kinematics for Virtual Reality

James M. Bern*, William C. May, Austin Osborn, Francesco Stella, Sadra Zargarzadeh, Josie Hughes

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

Abstract

We show how a variety of techniques from Computer 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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedins of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024
PublisherIEEE
Pages14957-14963
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)979-8-3503-8457-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: 13 May 202417 May 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period13/05/2417/05/24

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

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