{"id":426,"date":"2026-02-10T08:17:29","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T08:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/?p=426"},"modified":"2026-02-10T08:17:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T08:17:29","slug":"how-to-build-a-general-soft-robotic-controller-inspired-by-neuronal-structural-and-plastic-synapses-that-adapts-to-diverse-arms-tasks-and-perturbations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/?p=426","title":{"rendered":"How to build a general soft robotic controller inspired by neuronal structural and plastic synapses that adapts to diverse arms, tasks, and perturbations?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Zhiqiang Tang, Liying Tian, Wenci Xin, Qianqian Wang, Daniela Rus, and Cecilia Laschi. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/epdf\/10.1126\/sciadv.aea3712\"><strong>A general soft robotic controller inspired by neuronal structural and plastic synapses that adapts to diverse arms, tasks, and perturbations<\/strong><\/a>. Science Advances, 12,eaea3712(2026).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Abstract<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8220;<strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">Human intelligence arises from the interplay between a compliant morphology and a cognitive system that is capable of adaptive learning<\/span><\/strong>. Soft robots exhibit similar mechanical compliance, but they <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">still need learning capabilities that can be generalized across tasks and adapted to unknown conditions<\/span><\/strong>. We present a <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">neuron-inspired control framework that couples a paired offline-online decomposition with a learned contraction metric<\/span><\/strong>. Offline <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\u201cstructural synapses\u201d<\/span> <\/strong>encode task-agnostic features, while <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">online \u201cplastic synapses\u201d<\/span><\/strong> are configuration-specific parameters updated by error-gated rules consistent with long-term potentiation and depression. The contraction metric serves as a homeostatic constraint, providing a stability guarantee. We validate our approach on cable-driven and shape-memory-alloy soft arms across trajectory tracking, pick-and-place, and whole-body shaping tasks. Compared with baseline methods, our approach reduces tracking error by 44 to 55% and maintains more than 92% shape accuracy under <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">perturbations, including varying payloads, dynamic airflow, and actuator failures.<\/span><\/strong> These results establish <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">a general controller that adapts to diverse soft arms, tasks, and perturbations<\/span><\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Zhiqiang Tang, Liying Tian, Wenci Xin, Qianqian Wang, Daniela Rus, and Cecilia Laschi. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/epdf\/10.1126\/sciadv.aea3712\"><strong>A general soft robotic controller inspired by neuronal structural and plastic synapses that adapts to diverse arms, tasks, and perturbations<\/strong><\/a>. Science Advances, 12,eaea3712(2026).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zhiqiang Tang, Liying Tian, Wenci Xin, Qianqian Wang, Daniela Rus, and Cecilia Laschi. A general soft robotic controller inspired by neuronal structural and plastic synapses that adapts to diverse arms, tasks, and perturbations. Science Advances, 12,eaea3712(2026). Abstract &#8220;Human intelligence arises from the interplay between a compliant morphology and a cognitive system that is capable of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,7],"tags":[139,136,137,141,138,140],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brain-inspired-robotics","category-neuromorphic-robotics","tag-arms","tag-controller","tag-neuronal-structural-synapses","tag-perturbations","tag-plastic-synapses","tag-tasks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":427,"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspiredrobotics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}