Abstract

An octopus arm with a flexible structure and no rigid skeleton shows a high degree of freedom and flexibility. These excellent features are suitable for working in an environment having fragile and unknown-shaped objects. Therefore, a soft robot arm resembling an octopus arm can be useful as a harvesting machine without damaging crops in the agricultural field, as a rehabilitation apparatus in the welfare field, as a safe surgery tool in the medical field, and so on. Unlike industrial robots, to consider the applications of the soft robot arm, the instructions for it relating to a task cannot in many cases be given as a numerical value, and the motion according to an operator’s sense and intent is useful. This paper describes the design and feedback control of a soft master-slave robot system. The system is configured with two soft rubber machines; one is a slave machine that is the soft robot arm mimicking the muscle arrangement of the octopus arm by pneumatic artificial muscles, and the other is a master machine that gives the target motion to the slave machine. Both are configured with soft materials. The slave machine has an actuating part and a sensing part, it can perform bending and torsional motions, and these motions are estimated by the sensing part with threads that connect to wire encoders. The master machine is almost the same configuration, but it has no actuating part. The slave machine is driven according to the deformation of the master machine. We confirmed experimentally that the slave machine followed the master machine that was deformed by an operator.

Highlights

  • Robots have been expected to play an active role in the agricultural, medical and welfare fields

  • We consider that soft robot arms/hands have a high potential to be applied as artificial muscles

  • We developed the soft robot arm with artificial muscles corresponding to the transverse muscles (TMs), the longitudinal muscles (LMs), and the oblique muscles (OMs), and its motion soft robot arm with artificial muscles corresponding to the TMs, the LMs, and the OMs, and its motion

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Summary

Introduction

Robots have been expected to play an active role in the agricultural, medical and welfare fields. To realize the soft robots, soft actuators consisting of soft materials are remarkably essential elements They can ensure a high safety by their compliance and back-drivability without any complicated compliance control. We consider that soft robot arms/hands have a high potential to be applied as artificial muscles. They can have important advantages in shaping adaptability and lightness of weight. Feedback control by the master-slave method was realized for the soft robot arm. Through the master-slave system, the bending, torsional, and combination motions of the soft robot arm were controlled based on the operator’s intent

Thin McKibben Artificial Muscle
Soft Robot Arm Structure
Configuration
Configuration of the Sensing Part
10. Sensing principle the soft arm robot arm motion wire encoders:
13. Comparison and thethe slave machine
Conclusions
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