Hydraulicdriven soft robot for entering into small gap fed by indirect information of contacting state The soft robot which has an elastic body has increased interest because of its prospects with regard to entering into small gaps such as in rubble by deforming the body according to a contacting object like an amoeba. One of the issues regarding the soft robot is the locomotion ability and another is effective usage of an appropriate sensor because the present actuator or sensor has a rigid body that prevents the deformation of the robot. This paper describes waterdriven robot that generates friction locally to kick or pull the body, and it explains indirect sensing for the soft robot. A water pressure sensor is adopted to indirectly measure the contact information, and is attached near the flexible body. Because the sensor does not prevent deformation by setting an appropriate position, the body can deform according to a shape of a contact obstacle, and the sensor indicates a difference in the shape of the obstacles by moving under the obstacle. The paper also describes a feedback controller by using the pressure information that avoids break of the body inflated by water.

Dynamic Control of Soft Robots with Internal Constraints in the Presence of Obstacles The development of effective reduced order models for soft robots is paving the way toward the development of a new generation of model based techniques, which leverage classic rigid robot control. However, several soft robot features differentiate the softbodied case from the rigidbodied one. First, soft robots are built to work in the environment, so the presence of obstacles in their path should always be explicitly accounted by their control systems. Second, due to the complex kinematics, the actuation of soft robots is mapped to the state space nonlinearly resulting in spaces with different sizes. Moreover, soft robots often include internal constraints and thus actuation is typically limited in the range of action and it is often unidirectional. This paper proposes a control pipeline to tackle the challenge of controlling soft robots with internal constraints in environments with obstacles. We show how the constraints on actuation can be propagated and integrated with geometrical constraints, taking into account physical limits imposed by the presence of obstacles. We present a hierarchical control architecture capable of handling these constraints, with which we are able to regulate the position in space of the tip of a soft robot with the discussed characteristics.