Design and Intelligent Planning Simulation Method of a Space Bionic Soft Robot
LIU Wuji1, JING Zhongliang1, CHEN Wujun2, PAN Han1
1. School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China; 2. School of Naval Architecture, Ocean & Civil Engineering}, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Abstract:Conventional space rigid-body robots are subject to defects such as limited degree of freedom and low environmental adaptability. For those problems, a soft robot based on the organism structure is designed inspired by inchworm and snake, which is applicable to space in-orbit service. Firstly, the prototype of the soft robot is built and the drive characteristics of the Ni-Ti shape memory alloy (SMA) as the actuators are studied. A visual control interface is designed and the manoeuvrability of the soft robot prototype is verified by physical experiments. Besides, the Q-learning algorithm and the corresponding reward function based on the designed soft robot structure are designed. A simulation model of the soft robot is built, and autonomous learning and planning experiment of the robot arm model based on Q-learning is completed in the simulation environment. The experiment results show that the robot arm can converge to a stable state in a short time and complete planning tasks independently. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is effective and feasible, and the reinforcement learning method has a good application prospect in the intelligent planning and control of soft robots.
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