Reduced-Order Modelling for Soft Robots

Soft robots’ natural dynamics calls for the development of tailored modeling techniques for control. However, the high-dimensional state space of the geometrically exact modeling approaches for soft robots, i.e., Cosserat rod and Finite Element Methods (FEM), has been identified as a key obstacle in controller design. To address this niche, Reduced-Order Modeling (ROM), i.e., the approximation of the continuous models, and Model Order Reduction (MOR), i.e. reducing the state space dimension of a high fidelity FEM-based model, have recently been extensively investigated. This workshop, for the first time, will bring together experts to highlight the recent developments around ROM and MOR, guide the advancement, and help it to become a well-established topic. Selected experts from academia and industry will give seminars on the techniques they have developed, with a critical discussion on their requirements, performance, and limitations. The workshop will conclude with a discussion between panellists and attendees to review the presented insights and discuss road maps and solutions to the remaining challenges. The workshop is intended for all researchers in soft robotics theory, design optimisation, modelling, and control with different levels of expertise.

We aim to bring together experts in the field to answer the following questions:

• What have been and can be the impacts of ROM and MOR frameworks on the Soft Robotics community?

• What are the immediate and most general requirements in the Soft Robotics community to be addressed by new theories?

• How to decide between existing ROM and MOR techniques for a given simulation, analysis, or control task?

• How to make these methods be more understandable and approachable to be widely accepted for multidisciplinary Soft Robotics research?

• What are the means of achieving fast yet accurate computational performance for a variety of tasks such as modelling, design optimization, controller design, and deep-learning research?

• How to develop inter-operable software toolkits around ROM and MOR techniques?

• What problems cannot be solved with a 'perfect' simulator?