Motion control for an inflatable robotic arm using ROS

Nowadays, soft robotics is becoming increasingly significant. Soft robotics is a subfield of robotics that focuses on the development of devices made of soft, flexible materials that perform better when interacting with humans and their surroundings. Due to their unique features and advantages, soft robots have a considerable range of applications, such as surgery, prosthetics, pain management, and space exploration. Space application is one of the areas where soft robots may perform and provide considerable benefits. Their lightweight nature allows them to be easily contained in a small package and deployed when required. This characteristic indirectly lowers the cost of launching the manipulator into orbit because it takes up less space and weighs less than a rigid robot. Due to their flexible elements, soft robots can only exert a limited amount of force. Furthermore, under stress, they might exhibit deformations that are difficult to compensate for. As a result of their highly non-linear dynamics, rigid robotics control cannot be successfully applied to soft robots. Furthermore, in the case of the aerospace industry application, it is necessary to carry out an in-depth study of the materials used for the construction of the manipulator in order to make it resistant to hostile environments such as space. The goal of this thesis is to control a three-degree-of-freedom robot using the robotic software ROS 1.0. The robot to be controlled, the POPUP robot, is a soft manipulator developed for space applications in the laboratories of the Politecnico di Torino, it is made up of two inflatable links and three rigid joints. The robotic software ROS 1.0 used to control the manipulator is an open-source robot meta-operating system. It offers several services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message passing between processes, and package management. It also includes tools and libraries for obtaining, constructing, writing, and running code across multiple computers. Using this library tool, it was feasible to create complete robot control, allowing for the integration of other devices and the creation of a modular framework. The application and the entire system have been configured and designed to be versatile and modular, allowing for easy integration both in terms of hardware, with the addition of sensors and motors on the manipulator, and software with the use of tools for simulating and monitoring the POPUP robot.