[Submitted on 21 Sep 2026]
Title:Cosserat Modeling of Trimmed Helicoid Soft Arms with a Separated-Section Constitutive Law
View a PDF of the paper titled Cosserat Modeling of Trimmed Helicoid Soft Arms with a Separated-Section Constitutive Law, by Zhihang Qin and 11 other authors
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Abstract:Cosserat rod models for soft robots usually construct sectional stiffness by summing material properties over a common cross-section. This assumption becomes inaccurate for trimmed helicoid arms, where load-bearing helix domains are separated and connected only through sparse fused crossings. This paper formulates a separated-section constitutive law that evaluates each helix domain in its local frame and pulls its constitutive response back to the backbone, yielding an effective backbone stiffness. Sparse-fusion mechanics captures the additional compliance caused by relative motion between neighboring domains and determines channel-wise reduction profiles $\eta_c(s/L)$ for bending, torsion, and extension. The resulting effective sectional stiffness is strongly anisotropic: bending and extension are reduced by about one order of magnitude, whereas torsion remains close to the effective backbone stiffness. The resulting sectional law is embedded in a geometrically exact dynamic Cosserat model with GVS discretization and routed-tendon actuation. Across 103 measured configurations, the three datasets give pooled normalized position errors of \SI{7.7}{\percent}, \SI{6.7}{\percent}, and \SI{7.8}{\percent}, while each full-arm solve requires approximately \SI{0.3}{s} on one CPU core (Intel Xeon, Cascade Lake, \SI{2.8}{GHz}), enabling rapid model-based planning, state and load estimation, and morphology--control co-design for architected soft robots.
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.25264 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.25264v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.25264
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Zhihang Qin [view email] [v1] Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:13:33 UTC (5,138 KB)
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