Sensing and Dynamics Predictions for Electrothermally-Actuated Soft Robot Limbs.

Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep challenges, even with available sensor data, due to complex electrical-thermal-mechanical interactions and hysteresis. This article proposes a framework for sensing and dynamics modeling of actuator states, particularly temperature of SMA wires, which is used to predict robot motions.