On the optimal control of rate-independent soft crawlers

Existence of optimal solutions and necessary optimality conditions for a controlled version of Moreau's sweeping process are derived. The control is a measurable ingredient of the dynamics and the constraint set is a polyhedron. The novelty consists in considering time periodic trajectories, adding the requirement that the control has zero average, and considering an integral functional that lacks weak semicontinuity. A model coming from the locomotion of a soft-robotic crawler, that motivated our setting, is analysed in detail. In obtaining necessary conditions, a variant of the method of discrete approximations is used.