Design of complex robots (adapted robots, continuum/soft robots)

Most commercialized robots are constrained by a narrow vision of their functions and real-life usage. Our vision is to enhance the complexity of the robotic platforms developed in the consortium and the commercialized robots available. This process will be based on the purpose of their use to guide their specifications (type of sensors, distribution along the robots, robot shape, robot acceptability,...) from the design phase. For instance, one of the most important tasks of a robotic system is to acquire knowledge about its environment. This is done by taking measurements using various sensors and then extracting significant features from those measurements. However, a number of important measures cannot be reliably acquired without a deep understanding of the complex interaction between all environmental characteristics and the sensors in question. To explore this relationship, we need to experiment with robots. In order to design and develop our own robotics system, we propose to use our fabrication laboratories (Fablab MASTIC), our platforms (ROBOTEX at GIPSA and TIMC) and researchers’ competences (GIPSA-LIG-INRIA) to implement and test robotic system with specific sensors and actuators. An example of this competence could be seen in the section related to experimental platforms: RAFU, Aerial robotics platform.

We will deploy this method on the illustrative example of continuum/soft robots - a disruptive class of robots changing the paradigm of standard rigid robotics by their miniaturization ability, their flexibility and the intended medical applications. Indeed, all the robotic phases in the study case of continuum robotics (design, perception, control, human-robot interface) should prematurely invoke the use, both end-users’ perception (clinicians and patients) and the environment they evolve in.

Design of continuum/soft robots is a tedious task mainly due to the limited dimensions (slender shapes with generally outer diameters lower than 20 mm), material choice for biocompatibility and safety purposes and an ever-lasting compromise between versatile, universal systems or patient/anatomy/task-specific ones. These challenges are augmented with the ability of such robots to provide the required dexterity (hence degrees of freedom), added to specific challenges of continuum robots in terms of shape actuation (the robot’s body is flexible), housing of medical/surgical tools within the inner diameter and integrability in current medical devices (i.e. within the working channels of current endoscopes).

This work package (WP) will be developed in close collaboration with the other WPs to define upstream perception (WP2) constraints, to address downstream needs from reasoning phase (WP3) and fundamentally relies on symbiotic interactions (WP4) in terms of proprioception, environment perception, and interface representation.