What about Soft Robotics?
While most of today’s robots are made out of rigid stuctures linked by actuated joints, we believe that the futur of Robotics lies in soft structures, entirely deformable and actuated by innovative means (for example cavities or cables) that will allow much more versatile structures.
The fileds of applications for such robots are very diverse: from medical robots that help achieving less invasive surgery to robots able to carefully lift heavy loads.
Who are we?
We are researchers at the INRIA Lille research center in France, in the research team Defrost. We have decided to develop a plugin for Soft Robots simulation in a powerful and open source framework – Sofa – dedicated to physics simulation.
What will you find here?
Along with the development of the plugin SoftRobots, we have worked on different soft robots and ways to implement their behaviour in the most realistic of manners. In parallel to this development, we are working on outreach tools for soft robotics. This is how we came to develop a simple soft robot that is easy to replicate, associated with dedicated tutorials to learn about soft robots simulation in a pedagogical way.