Robots fabricated with soft materials can provide higher flexibility and, thus, better safety while interacting in unpredictable situations. However, the usage of soft material makes it challenging to predict the deformation of a continuum body under actuation and, therefore, brings difficulty to the kinematic control of its movement. In this article, we present a geometry-based framework for computing the deformation of soft robots within the range of linear material elasticity. After formulating both manipulators and actuators as geometry elements, deformation can be efficiently computed by solving a constrained optimization problem. Because of its efficiency, forward and inverse kinematics for soft manipulators can be solved by an iterative algorithm with a low computational cost. Meanwhile, components with multiple materials can also be geometrically modeled in our framework with the help of a simple calibration. Numerical and physical experimental tests are conducted on soft manipulators driven by different actuators with large deformation to demonstrate the performance of our approach.

中文翻译：

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基于几何计算的软体机器人运动学

用软材料制造的机器人可以提供更高的灵活性，从而在不可预测的情况下进行交互时具有更好的安全性。然而，软材料的使用使得预测连续体在驱动下的变形具有挑战性，因此给其运动的运动控制带来了困难。在本文中，我们提出了一个基于几何的框架，用于计算线性材料弹性范围内软机器人的变形。在将操纵器和执行器都制定为几何元素之后，可以通过解决约束优化问题来有效地计算变形。由于其效率，软机械手的正向和逆向运动学可以通过迭代算法以低计算成本解决。同时，借助简单的校准，也可以在我们的框架中对具有多种材料的组件进行几何建模。在由具有大变形的不同执行器驱动的软机械臂上进行了数值和物理实验测试，以证明我们方法的性能。