Design of a compliant gripper and inverse kinematics control of a soft robotic arm

Soft robots are celebrated for their ability to store energy in their bodies, and efficiently releasing them during dynamic repetitive motions. I propose to exploit this capability to generate the first soft continuum manipulator able to perform a pick-and-place task in its dynamic regime. To this end, first the thesis will look at developing a fast and adaptive gripper, then it will look at the kinematics of the Helix soft manipulator and the possible human interactions in order to control it. Finally, the two contributions will be combined to analyse how the control is user friendly and to demonstrate the applicability and repeatability of the work.