Abstract
Compared with the rigid hand rehabilitation robot, the soft hand rehabilitation robot has the advantages of good flexibility, which is of great significance to its research. In order to make the soft hand rehabilitation robot have the advantages of high stiffness and simple manufacturing process, a nested structure is proposed for finger soft actuator in this paper. The nested structure consists of outer restraint structure and inner core structure. The inner core structure can realize deformation under the action of air pressure. The outer restraint structure can improve bending efficiency by restraining deformation in non-functional direction of inner core structure. On this basis, the processing technology of nested structure is designed, and the effect of structural parameters on performance is analyzed. In order to illustrate the advantages of nested structure, the performance of nested structure and fiber-constrained structure is compared by simulation, which includes bending angle, gripping force and expansion amount (by measuring the deformation of the cross section). The simulation results show the advantages of the nested structure. A prototype of the soft hand rehabilitation robot is developed with nested structure as finger soft actuator, and the experimental results prove the feasibility of design. The results of this study provide a reference for the structure design of soft hand rehabilitation robot.
Highlights
For the most hand rehabilitation robots, the main structure is made of metal or resin, and the structure is rigid.[1,2,3] With the rapid development of material science, some researchers have begun to use soft material instead of traditional rigid material to develop new type of hand rehabilitation robot
(1) A nested structure is proposed for finger soft actuator
It consists of outer restraint structure and inner core structure
Summary
For the most hand rehabilitation robots, the main structure is made of metal or resin, and the structure is rigid.[1,2,3] With the rapid development of material science, some researchers have begun to use soft material instead of traditional rigid material to develop new type of hand rehabilitation robot. The thickness of the bottom (outer restraint structure and inner core structure) and the width of the restraint structure of array distribution has a great effect on the bending effect and grasping force of the soft actuator. Soft actuator with nested structure has the advantage of high stiffness, large grasping force and small cross section deformation on the premise of large bending deformation, and its comprehensive performance is better than soft actuator with fiber-constrained structure. This proves the feasibility of the design in this paper.
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