title: Growing and evolving soft robots.
abstract: Completely soft and flexible robots offer to revolutionize fields ranging from search and rescue to endoscopic surgery. One of the outstanding challenges in this burgeoning field is the chicken-and-egg problem of body-brain design: Development of locomotion requires the preexistence of a locomotion-capable body, and development of a location-capable body requires the preexistence of a locomotive gait. This problem is compounded by the high degree of coupling between the material properties of a soft body (such as stiffness or damping coefficients) and the effectiveness of a gait. This article synthesizes four years of research into soft robotics, in particular describing three approaches to the co-discovery of soft robot morphology and control. In the first, muscle placement and firing patterns are coevolved for a fixed body shape with fixed material properties. In the second, the material properties of a simulated soft body coevolve alongside locomotive gaits, with body shape and muscle placement fixed. In the third, a developmental encoding is used to scalably grow elaborate soft body shapes from a small seed structure. Considerations of the simulation time and the challenges of physically implementing soft robots in the real world are discussed.
authors: Union College.
authors: John
authors: J
authors: Rieffel
authors: Davis
authors: D
authors: Knox
authors: Schuyler
authors: S
authors: Smith
authors: Barry
authors: B
authors: Trimmer
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005684:Gait; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012371:Robotics