Wang, XinranXinranWangRojas, NicolasNicolasRojas2022-03-242022-04-282022http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/95932Traditional dynamic models of continuum robots are in general computationally expensive and not suitable for real-time control. Recent approaches using learning-based methods to approximate the dynamic model of continuum robots for control have been promising, although real data hungry—which may cause potential damage to robots and be time consuming—and getting poorer performance when trained with simulation data only. This paper presents a modelbased learning framework for continuum robot closed-loop control that, by combining simulation and real data, shows to require only 100 real data to outperform a real-data-only controller trained using up to 10000 points. The introduced data-efficient framework with three control policies has utilized a Gaussian process regression (GPR) and a recurrent neural network (RNN). Control policy A uses a GPR model and a RNN trained in simulation to optimize control outputs for simulated targets; control policy B retrains the RNN in policy A with data generated from the GPR model to adapt to real robot physics; control policy C utilizes policy A and B to form a hybrid policy. Using a continuum robot with soft spines, we show that our approach provides an efficient framework to bridge the sim-to-real gap in model-based learning for continuum robots.© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.cs.ROcs.ROcs.SYeess.SYConference Paperhttps://www.dx.doi.org/10.1109/RoboSoft54090.2022.9762115https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9762115