Generalizable and Fast Surrogates: Model Predictive Control of Articulated Soft Robots using Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Soft robots can revolutionize several applications with high demands on dexterity and safety. When operating these systems, real-time estimation and control require fast and accurate models. However, prediction with first-principles (FP) models is slow, and learned black-box models have poor general...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on robotics pp. 1 - 18
Main Authors: Habich, Tim-Lukas, Mohammad, Aran, Ehlers, Simon F. G., Bensch, Martin, Seel, Thomas, Schappler, Moritz
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025
Subjects:
and learning for soft robots
control
model learning for control
Modeling
optimization and optimal control
physics-informed machine learning
ISSN:1552-3098, 1941-0468
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Soft robots can revolutionize several applications with high demands on dexterity and safety. When operating these systems, real-time estimation and control require fast and accurate models. However, prediction with first-principles (FP) models is slow, and learned black-box models have poor generalizability. Physics-informed machine learning offers excellent advantages here, but it is currently limited to simple, often simulated systems without considering changes after training. We propose physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for articulated soft robots (ASRs) with a focus on data efficiency. The amount of expensive real-world training data is reduced to a minimum - one dataset in one system domain. Two hours of data in different domains are used for a comparison against two gold-standard approaches: In contrast to a recurrent neural network, the PINN provides a high generalizability. The prediction speed of an accurate FP model is exceeded with the PINN by up to a factor of 467 at slightly reduced accuracy. This enables nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) of a pneumatic ASR. Accurate position tracking with the MPC running at 47 Hz is achieved in six dynamic experiments.
ISSN:1552-3098
1941-0468
DOI:10.1109/TRO.2025.3631818