pp. 2803-2824
S&M2657 Research Paper https://doi.org/10.18494/SAM.2021.3345 Published: August 24, 2021 Pneumatic Reservoir Computing for Sensing Soft Body: Computational Ability of Air in Tube and Its Application to Posture Estimation of Soft Exoskeleton [PDF] Toshihiro Kawase, Tetsuro Miyazaki, Takahiro Kanno, Kotaro Tadano, Yoshikazu Nakajima, and Kenji Kawashima (Received February 25, 2021; Accepted June 29, 2021) Keywords: soft robotics, physical reservoir computing, pneumatic system, pipelines, posture estimation
Sensing and computing the body states of soft-bodied robots require new methods. Recent
studies on soft robotics have shown their feasibility to be applied for these purposes; however,
they only addressed solid parts and not the behavior of inner fluids in soft robotics. In this study,
we investigated the possibility of a framework that can be used to estimate the body state by
exploiting air dynamics in tubes connecting chambers. The framework was designed on the
basis of the concept of physical reservoir computing. We focused on a case with a single tube
connection. A benchmark task emulated a nonlinear system and was evaluated by simulation.
The results showed that the computational ability depended on the inner diameter and length of
the tube and can be increased by selecting a suitable diameter and length. We physically
implemented the framework for the posture estimation of a soft exoskeleton using pneumatic
artificial rubber muscles (PARMs) as the connected chambers and evaluated the accuracy of
estimation of a thigh angle. The estimation accuracy showed a similar trend as a function of the
tube properties as that observed in the simulation. The framework can exploit the dynamics of
air in a tube and may be useful for the state estimation of soft-bodied robots.
Corresponding author: Toshihiro KawaseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Cite this article Toshihiro Kawase, Tetsuro Miyazaki, Takahiro Kanno, Kotaro Tadano, Yoshikazu Nakajima, and Kenji Kawashima, Pneumatic Reservoir Computing for Sensing Soft Body: Computational Ability of Air in Tube and Its Application to Posture Estimation of Soft Exoskeleton, Sens. Mater., Vol. 33, No. 8, 2021, p. 2803-2824. |