Abstract
Soft robots, devices with deformable bodies and powered by soft actuators, may fill a hitherto unexplored niche in outer space. All space-bound payloads are heavily limited in terms of mass and volume, due to the cost of launch and the size of spacecraft. Being constructed from stretchable materials allows many possibilities for compacting soft robots for launch and later deploying into a much larger volume, through folding, rolling, and inflation. This morphability can also be beneficial for adapting to operation in different environments, providing versatility, and robustness. To be truly soft, a robot must be powered by soft actuators. Dielectric elastomer transducers (DETs) offer many advantages as artificial muscles. They are lightweight, have a high work density, and are capable of artificial proprioception. Taking inspiration from nature, in particular the starfish podia, we present here bio-inspired inflatable DET actuators powering low-mass robots capable of performing complex motion that can be compacted to a fraction of their operating size.
Highlights
This paper presents bio-inspired inflatable actuators for space applications based on the starfish foot
Manual inflation was used for the purposes of characterising the MIDA actuators via a syringe attached to the air inlet tube
In this paper we have presented bio-inspired soft actuators mimicking the podia of starfish, using inflated dielectric elastomers as the primary component
Summary
This paper presents bio-inspired inflatable actuators for space applications based on the starfish foot. The cost of launching a kilogram of mass into Low Earth Orbit on the NASA space shuttle was in excess of $54,000 USD (Pielke, 1994) Though this has decreased twenty-fold with the advent of commercial launch platforms (Jones, 2018), spacecraft are still very constrained in terms of both mass and volume. One method for getting around these limitations is to launch many small structures and join them together once they are in orbit; this is how the International Space Station (ISS) was constructed. Another option is to design systems such that they can be stowed in a small volume, and deployed at a later time. The ways this can be achieved include simple systems with springs, complex origami structures (Pehrson et al, 2020), and inflatable structures (Freeland et al, 1998; Tarazaga et al, 2007; Chandra et al, 2018)
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