Redundancy and overactuation in cephalopod-inspired soft robot arms

Abstract

Current soft robotic arms commonly follow traditional—i.e. hard—robot design conventions. Omnidirectional soft arms most commonly consist of segments that contain three parallel longitudinal actuators, or actuator groups, of which one or two are activated to induce bending. This design uses the minimum number of actuators required for omnidirectional bending, which is consistent with traditional robot design but unnecessarily constrains the soft arm design space. The cephalopods that frequently inspire soft robot arms have tens of bundles of longitudinal muscle fibers, and these bundles are distributed around the limb circumference rather than grouped. This article analyzes fluid-driven soft arm architectures with up to 12 actuators, which mimics the redundant and distributed nature of cephalopod arms and tentacles, in order to investigate the performance implications of an arm morphology closer to nature. Overactuation (i.e. activating more than two actuators) was considered, which is possible because soft robots—unlike traditional robots—can tolerate misaligned or partially opposed actuation without jamming. A previously-developed generalizable model was used to simulate design performance, and a subset of the examined architectures were constructed and tested. Many-actuator soft arms achieve high strokes under equivalent load and equivalent actuation pressures, without sacrificing no-load reach. These arms are also able to achieve quasi-omnidirectionality, as well as to execute near constant-curvature turns using a simple actuation pattern and a single pressure signal. The introduced framework also enables non-circular cross sections that are not possible with minimalist arm designs, allowing the load capacity and reach to be tuned in multiple directions. Several elliptical cross section arms were analyzed to explore the potential of non-circular cross sections. Overactuated, many-actuator arms significantly expand the design space of soft arms, improving performance in some cases and introducing options to tailor behavior that are infeasible in structurally minimal arms.