Gait Synthesis for Modular Soft Robots

Soft robots present a new opportunity for designing robots that can be produced quickly (on the order of hours), are capable of a variety of motions and behaviors, and are able to address a wide range of environments and tasks. The large design space of soft actuators can be leveraged to rapidly generate libraries of robotic components that can be used to compose modular soft robotic systems. To take full advantage of the large design space, we must have techniques for automatically synthesizing soft robot motions and behaviors. In this work, we develop a method for synthesizing gaits for walking soft robots, and show experimental results demonstrating synthesized gaits.