A hybrid dynamic model for bio-inspired soft robots - Application to a flapping-wing micro air vehicle.

Mathieu Porez (1) , Frédéric Boyer (1) , Ayman Belkhiri (2)

1 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
2 Equipe Robotique

The paper deals with the dynamic modeling of bio-inspired robots with soft appendages such as flying insect-like or swimming fish-like robots. In order to model such soft systems, we propose to use the Mobile Multibody System framework introduced in [1][2][3]. In such a framework, the robot is considered as a tree-like structure of rigid bodies where the evolution of the position of the joints is governed by stress-strain laws or control torques. Based on the Newton-Euler formulation of these systems, we propose a new algorithm able to compute at each step of a time loop both the net and passive joint accelerations along with the control torques supplied by the motors. To illustrate, based on previous work [4], the proposed algorithm is applied to the simulation of the hovering flight of a soft flapping-wing insect-like robot (see the attached video).

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Mathieu Porez, Frédéric Boyer, Ayman Belkhiri. A hybrid dynamic model for bio-inspired soft robots - Application to a flapping-wing micro air vehicle.. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'2014), May 2014, Hong Kong, China. pp.1-8. ⟨hal-00861321v2⟩