Defrost Soft Robots

The DEFROST project is grouping people working on designing, controlling and fabricating soft robots.

Future robots don’t have to be «rigid» but made of complex deformable structures, composed of stiff and soft regions, close to organic materials that we can find in the nature. Soft robotics opens very attractive perspectives in terms of new applications, reduction of manufacturing costs, robustness, efficiency and security. It could result in great advances in robotics in the next years.

The main obstacle to make this possible is that the current methods to design and control don’t work for deformable robots and new approaches have to be invented. To overcome this obstacle, we work on a novel approach that integrates a real-time model of both the robot deformations and its interaction into the control loop of the soft robots. This is where the challenge begins…

https://team.inria.fr/defrost/
https://www.cristal.univ-lille.fr/?rubrique29&eid=38