Kraken – A Multiphysics Soft Robot Simulation Platform

The field of soft robotics has offered an opportunity to build both biologically inspired robots, as well as robots compliant with living organisms. However, a lack of efficient modeling and simulation platforms has slowed the growth of this field and prevented the widespread adoption of soft robots. By building off Idaho National Lab’s MOOSE framework, we have developed a new open-source FEM application, Kraken, which is capable of simulating the multiphysics, such as mechanical deformation, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, etc., encountered in soft robots. The primary contributions of this work are capabilities to simulate nonlinear hyperelastic material models, simulation of the dynamics of soft actuators, and the ability to solve complex contact mechanics problems that often emerge when simulating soft robots. In addition, we demonstrate the accuracy of our system by comparing theoretical, simulated, and experimental results.