Abstract
Tip-extending soft robots, taking flexible film or rubber as body material and fluid pressure as input power, exhibit excellent advantages in constrained and cluttered environments for detection and manipulation. However, existing soft continuum robots are of great challenges in achieving multiple, mutually independent, and on-demand active steering over a long distance without precise steering control. In this paper, we introduce a vine-like soft robot made up of a pressurized thin-walled vessel integrated with the high controllability of a control system with multiple degrees of freedom in three dimensions. Moreover, steering and kinematic models to relate the steering angle and robot length to the location of the robot tip are provided, and a dynamic finite element model for analyzing the motion of the spatial consecutive steering is established. We demonstrate the abilities of disinfection of the robot moving in a long and tortuous pipeline and detection in a multi-obstacle constrained environment. It is established that the robot exhibits great advantages in active consecutive steering over a long distance, high controllability in completing more complex path planning, and significant ability of carrying operational tools for ventilation pipeline disinfection and multi-obstacle detection. The bionic soft robot shows great promise for use in environment sensing, target detecting, and equipment servicing.
Highlights
Soft robots have great advantages, such as dexterous movement behavior, unprecedented adaptation, and extremely high security, for inspection and exploration work in constrained, uncharted, and cluttered environment [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Among the different types of soft robots, soft continuum robots, which are designed based on the principle of vine growth, have attracted significant attention due to the following unique advantages: (1) pneumatic eversion to move independent of the environment, (2) flexible feature to mitigate the damage, and (3) infinite extension and unlimited degrees of freedom to expand workspace [7,8,9,10,11,12]
Greer et al installed series pneumatic artificial muscles along the robot body to investigate the navigation of the robot by inflating the contraction of sPAMs
Summary
Soft robots have great advantages, such as dexterous movement behavior, unprecedented adaptation, and extremely high security, for inspection and exploration work in constrained, uncharted, and cluttered environment [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Among the different types of soft robots, soft continuum robots, which are designed based on the principle of vine growth, have attracted significant attention due to the following unique advantages: (1) pneumatic eversion to move independent of the environment, (2) flexible feature to mitigate the damage, and (3) infinite extension and unlimited degrees of freedom to expand workspace [7,8,9,10,11,12] Their continuum nature introduces various challenges for modeling and controlling [13, 14]. In Hawkes et al, the pressure can only work on the latch at the tip with a long response time to reach the broken pressure over a long distance, and the sPAM scheme is limited to a simple path because it is impossible for one pneumatic artificial muscle to control
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