Modeling and control of a soft robotic arm based on a fractional order control approach

This article belongs to the Special Issue Fractional Order Control Techniques for Robots.Controlling soft robots is a significant challenge due to the nonlinear elastic nature of the soft materials that conform their structure. This paper studies the identification and control problems of a novel two-degrees-of-freedom, tendon-actuated, soft robotic arm. A decoupled identification approach is presented; later, a fractional order control strategy is proposed and tested experimentally, in comparison with PI solutions. The simulation and experimental results show the goodness of the modeling and control approaches discussed.This research has been supported by the project SOFIA, with reference PID2020-113194GB-I00, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economics, Industry and Competitiveness, and the project Desarrollo de articulaciones blandas para aplicaciones robóticas, with reference IND2020/IND-1739, funded by the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (CAM) (Department of Education and Research)