Visual Servoing of Soft Robotic Arms by Binocular

Abstract

Soft robotic arms are complementing traditional rigid arms in many fields due to its multiple degrees of freedom, safety and adaptability to the environment. In recent years, soft robotic arms have become the focus in robotics research and gained increasing attention from scientists and engineers. Despite the rapid progress of its design and manufacturing processes in the past decade, an obstacle restricting the development of soft robotic arms remained unsolved. The suitable sensors for soft robotic arm have not appeared on the market and the integration of sensors into soft robotic arm has been difficult, since most sensors and actuator systems, such as those used in traditional robotic arms, are rigid sensors and rather simple. Therefore, finding a suitable soft robotic arm sensor has become an urgent issue in this field. In this paper, a simple and feasible method with a binocular camera is proposed to control the soft robotic arm. Binocular is employed to detect the spatial target position at first and then coordinates of target point will be transmitted to the soft robot to generate a control signal moving the soft robotic arm, and then the distance from target to the end effector will be measured in real time.