Cosimo Della Santina

The bodies of Articulated and Continuum Soft Robots are designed so to present intelligent behaviors even when disconnected from the robotic brain. Effectively exploiting this intelligence requires a complete perspective change apropos the classic control of rigid robots. Rather than imposing a prescribed behavior detached from the natural behavior of the robot, we want the controller to work in synergy with the intelligent body.

For example, it is intuitively clear that the ability of robotic systems to perform efficient oscillatory motions can be massively enhanced by introducing elastic and soft elements in their design. Thus, Soft Robots should be especially suited to perform oscillatory tasks (e.g. locomotion, industrial repetitive tasks). Yet, formalizing this intuition and exploiting these capabilities came out to be all but easy. In this talk, I will discuss our recent efforts in generalizing modal analysis to Soft Robots (aka nonlinear mechanical systems subject to an elastic potential field) through the introduction of a nonlinear generalization of the linear Eigenspaces: the Eigenmanifolds. I will then discuss how this formalization can be combined with control theory towards the implementation of hyper-efficient and goal-directed oscillatory behaviors in soft robotic systems.