| Summary: | Due to an infinite number of degrees of freedom,
soft robotic arms remain challenging to control. Past work has
drawn inspiration from biological structures–for example the
elephant trunk–to design and control biomimetic soft robotic
arms. However, to date, the models used to inform the control
of biomimetic arms lack generalizability, and largely rely on
qualitative assumptions. Here, we present a computationally
efficient methodology to control fiber-based slender soft robotic
arms inspired by the theory of active filaments. Our approach
seeks to optimize fibrillar activation under prescribed control
objectives. We evaluate the methodology under various control
objectives, and consider several distinct fiber architectures. Our
results suggest that we can efficiently compute fibrillar activations
towards the imposed control objective. Based on our findings, we
discuss the effect of actuator complexity on actuation capabilities
as a function of the number and arrangement of fibers. Our
method can be applied universally towards the objective-based
control and design of slender soft robotic arms with embedded
fibers.
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