This paper presents an application of the energy shaping methodology to control a flexible, elastic Cosserat rod model of a single octopus arm. The novel contributions of this work are two-fold: (i) a control-oriented modeling of the anatomically realistic internal muscular architecture of an octopus arm; and (ii) the integration of these muscle models into the energy shaping control methodology. The control-oriented modeling takes inspiration in equal parts from theories of nonlinear elasticity and energy shaping control. By introducing a stored energy function for muscles, the difficulties associated with explicitly solving the matching conditions of the energy shaping methodology are avoided. The overall control design problem is posed as a bilevel optimization problem. Its solution is obtained through iterative algorithms. The methodology is numerically implemented and demonstrated in a full-scale dynamic simulation environment Elastica. Two bio-inspired numerical experiments involving the control of octopus arms are reported.
@article{arxiv.2010.03368,
title = {Controlling a CyberOctopus Soft Arm with Muscle-like Actuation},
author = {Heng-Sheng Chang and Udit Halder and Ekaterina Gribkova and Arman Tekinalp and Noel Naughton and Mattia Gazzola and Prashant G. Mehta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.03368},
year = {2023}
}