DEFROST Research team

DEFormable Robotics SofTware

Leader: Christian Duriez
Type: Project team
Research center(s): Lille
Field: Perception, Cognition and Interaction
Theme: Robotics and Smart environments
Partner(s): Ecole Centrale de Lille,Université des sciences et technologies de Lille (Lille 1),CNRS
Collaborator(s): E. CENTRALE LILLE, U. LILLE 1 (USTL), U. LILLE 3 (UCDG), CNRS, INRIA

Team presentation

Our Vision

Future robots don’t need to be «rigid» but made of complex deformable structures, composed of stiff and soft regions, close to organic materials that we can find in the nature. Soft robotics opens very attractive perspectives in terms of new applications, reduction of manufacturing costs, robustness, efficiency and security. It could constitute a great jump in robotics in the following years.

The challenge

The biggest obstacle to make this possible is that the current methods to design and control don’t work for deformable ones and new approaches have to be invented.

To overcome this obstacle we work on a novel approach that integrates a real-time model of both the robot deformations and its interaction into the control loop of the soft robots. This is where the challenge begins…