First Steps with Sofa – Hands on Soft Robotics

For the simulations of soft bobots, we are relying on the open source framework Sofa, that is a powerful tool for physics simulation. The research team Defrost at the INRIA Lille in France is developping a plugin for Sofa, dedicated to the control and simulation of soft robots: SoftRobots. By using Sofa and the SoftRobots plugin, you get access to a simulation plateform that can allow you to simulate at the same time the robot and its environment.

Both Sofa and the plugin include many templates and examples to make your start in Sofa more intuitive. Specifically for the Tripod, you will find different tutorials in the plugin: an introduction to Sofa named FirstSteps and a tutorial on the simulation of the robot named Tripod.

For the installation of Sofa and the SoftRobots plugin, we invite you to follow these links to the websites of the framework & of the plugin:

Once you have installed Sofa, you can launch the FirstSteps tutorial (located in the plugin SoftRobots/docs/tutorials/FirstSteps in the scene firststeps-tuto.pyscn). This tutorial will help you to understand the basis of object modelling with Sofa, while also helping you getting more familiar with the interface of Sofa. This tutorial is also available as a video tutorial that you can play below.