Abstract
Energy consumption has significant influence on the working time of soft robots in mobile applications. Fluidic soft actuators usually release pressurized fluid to environment in retraction motion, resulting in dissipation of considerable energy, especially when the actuators are operated frequently. This article mainly explores the potential and approaches of harvesting the energy released from the actuators. First, the strain energy and pressurized energy stored in fluidic soft actuators are modeled based on elastic mechanics. Then, taking soft fiber-reinforced bending actuators as case study, the stored energy is calculated and its parametric characteristics are presented. Finally, two energy harvesting schematics as well as dynamic models are proposed and evaluated using numerical analysis. The results show that the control performance of the energy harvesting system becomes worse because of increased damping effect and its energy harvesting efficiency is only 14.2% due to the losses of energy conversion. The energy harvesting system in pneumatic form is a little more complex. However, its control performance is close to the original system and its energy harvesting efficiency reaches about 44.1%.
Highlights
Soft robots have drawn growing research interests in recent years due to their inherent compliance and flexibility in comparison with traditional rigid robots.[1]
This article mainly explores the potential and approaches of harvesting the energy released from fluidic soft actuator
According to the developed model, it is found that the energy stored in the fluidic soft actuator is considerable and approximately linear with the bending angle
Summary
Soft robots have drawn growing research interests in recent years due to their inherent compliance and flexibility in comparison with traditional rigid robots.[1]. Calculations with different dimensional parameters are implemented in order to understand their effect on the total stored energy of fluidic soft actuators The microcompressors are often the best choice for soft robots with relatively low pressure and flow rate because they provide the highest flow capacity in a commercial package.[16] Figure 5 shows a pneumatic drive system for fiber-reinforced fluidic soft actuators. When the fluidic soft actuator is retracting, the pressurized air can drive the energy harvester and generate electricity instead of releasing to the atmosphere directly. The rotor dynamics of the energy harvester is given as dom dt
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