Abstract
Inspired by nature, soft robotics aims at enhancing robots capabilities through the use of soft materials. This article presents the study of soft continuum robots which can change their dynamic behavior thanks to a proper design of their damping properties. It enables an under-actuated dynamic strategy to control multi-chamber pneumatic systems using a reduced number of feeding lines. The present work starts from the conceptual investigation of a way to tune the damping properties of soft continuum robots, and leverages on the introduction of viscous fluid within the soft chamber wall to produce dissipative actions. Several solutions are analyzed in simulations and the most promising one is tested experimentally. The proposed approach employs a layer of granular material immersed in viscous silicone oil to increase the damping effect. After validation and experimental characterization, the method is employed to build soft continuum actuators with different deformation patterns, i.e., extending, contracting and bending. Experimental results show the dynamic behavior of the presented actuators. Finally, the work reports information on how the actuators are designed and builded, together with a discussion about possible applications and uses.
Highlights
In recent years soft systems are raising more and more interest in the robotic community and an increasing number of applications have been developed (Tan et al, 2007; Rus and Tolley, 2015)
We already introduced the importance of a rate-dependent behavior in our previous work (Piazza et al, 2016; Di Lallo et al, 2018), where we presented a method to implement a simple yet effective dynamic morphological computation strategy to soft articulated robots
The rationale behind this study derives from an underactuated control strategy for soft robots and fits in the perspective of a dynamic morphological computation
Summary
In recent years soft systems are raising more and more interest in the robotic community and an increasing number of applications have been developed (Tan et al, 2007; Rus and Tolley, 2015). Some examples include: hands, where the order of the fingers closing can yield different grasping patterns (see e.g., Deimel and Brock, 2013; Piazza et al, 2016); worm-like robots, as in Shepherd et al (2011) and Tolley et al (2014), or snakelike robots, as in Greer et al (2018), which could adapt their gait in order to move across different terrains or to navigate difficult obstacles; anymaloids as the soft robotic fish presented in Katzschmann et al (2018), where the soft material is used to replicate the soft behavior of a fish fin, or the soft octopus robot presented in Laschi et al (2012); manipulators as in Lee et al (2016) or Takeichi et al (2017), where the Giacometti continuum soft arm is used for industrial inspection; and medical devices, as in (Roche et al, 2017) where a soft robotic sleeve is used to assist cardiovascular function in an in vivo surgery, or as in Polygerinos et al (2015a) where a soft hand exoskeleton is made with continuously deformable parts All these systems implement different functions mostly thanks to the possibility of inflating/deflating their chambers in different sequences. Each chamber can be described through the following system of nonlinear differential equations (White, 1999): mi
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