Abstract
Soft limbs with anisotropic stiffness are common in nature and enable animals to solve a variety of tasks, including locomotion and manipulation. This mixture of hardness and softness enables animals to efficiently control the unpredictable contact forces that occur while performing such tasks. A challenge for soft robotics is to create artificial limbs that mimic natural mixtures of hardness and softness for use as a building block for soft, adaptable robots. This article presents the design of a novel pneumatic limb module with adjustable length and anisotropic stiffness. The artificial limb is designed with a rigid telescopic endoskeleton inside a rubber bellow, which we show is able to resist buckling, while remaining externally soft. Finally, we present the design of a hexapod walker based on the limb units.
Highlights
Soft robotics has recently emerged as a field, promising safer, more adaptable and more energyefficient robots (Trivedi et al, 2008; Pfeifer et al, 2012; Trimmer, 2014)
We introduce Hexo-Flexo bot, a hybrid hard–soft hexapod developed for the RoboSoft terrestrial locomotion challenge
This article will introduce the design and analysis of the pneumatic limb module, before describing the design of Hexo-Flexo bot and the lessons learnt from the RoboSoft Grand Challenge
Summary
Soft robotics has recently emerged as a field, promising safer, more adaptable and more energyefficient robots (Trivedi et al, 2008; Pfeifer et al, 2012; Trimmer, 2014). A challenge for soft robotics is developing systems which have the ability to be stiff when needed, while keeping the benefits of softness (Kim et al, 2013). Prior work in this area can be broadly divided into mechanisms that switch between stiff and compliant states such as the universal gripper (Brown et al, 2010), shape-memory polymer McKibben actuators (Takashima et al, 2010), or Stiff-Flop (Cianchetti et al, 2013) and those which combine stiff and rigid materials (Stokes et al, 2014). The telescopic endoskeleton prevents buckling during locomotion by increasing both axial and radial stiffness, but maintains enough axial compliance to allow adaptation to small ground pertubations and pneumatic control of limb length. This article will introduce the design and analysis of the pneumatic limb module, before describing the design of Hexo-Flexo bot and the lessons learnt from the RoboSoft Grand Challenge
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