Online Learning for Behavior Switching in a Soft Robotic Arm

Soft robots possess several potential advantages over traditional articulated ones and have attracted significant interest in recent years. However, to control this new type of robots using conventional model-based robotic control approaches is generally ineffective. In this paper, we investigate the challenge to embed and switch among multiple behaviors for an octopus-inspired soft robotic arm. An online learning method for reservoir computing is exploited for this task. This online learning method does not require a separate teaching data collection phase; thus, it has the potential to achieve autonomy in soft robots. Our result shows the feasibility of this approach.