Design Optimization of Modular Reconfigurable Soft Robots

Increasing the functionality, adpatability, and versaility of robots usually means increasing the cost – think of the complex and expensive robots advertised in the news. Alternatively, we can use innovative methods to design and build low-cost robots capable of exploring complex environments. In this research, we focus on two solutions: soft robots and modular reconfigurable robots. Soft robots are able to passively adapt to environmental forces in a way that simplifies control, reduces the required number of actuators, and enables relatively simple designs to exhibit complex behavior. Then, we can build a collection (or swarm) of many soft robots designed to both function individually and combine together into larger robots, which we refer to as modular reconfigurable robots. Figuring out how to design and control these systems ins’t trivial. Nevertheless, we can use modern CAD software and map projection formulas to optimize the design of the robots such that multiple robots can both move individually and combine together to form a ball.