Abstract
Traditional robots have rigid underlying structures that limit their ability to interact with their environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators have rigid links and can manipulate objects using only their specialised end effectors. These robots often encounter difficulties operating in unstructured and highly congested environments. A variety of animals and plants exhibit complex movement with soft structures devoid of rigid components. Muscular hydrostats e.g. octopus arms and elephant trunks are almost entirely composed of muscle and connective tissue and plant cells can change shape when pressurised by osmosis. Researchers have been inspired by biology to design and build soft robots. With a soft structure and redundant degrees of freedom, these robots can be used for delicate tasks in cluttered and/or unstructured environments. This paper discusses the novel capabilities of soft robots, describes examples from nature that provide biological inspiration, surveys the state of the art and outlines existing challenges in soft robot design, modelling, fabrication and control.
Highlights
Simaan et al (2004) presented an overview of snake-like active bending devices used for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) of the throat
In addition to large fluid-filled spaces and muscle fibres arranged in multiple orientations, the walls of most hydrostatic skeletons are reinforced with connective tissue fibres arranged as continuous parallel sheets of fibres that wrap the animal in both left- and right-handed helical arrays
The octopus arm and guard cell indicate the potential for soft mobile structures, but significant challenges remain in the development of soft robots and the areas of active materials, electromechanical design, modelling for optimisation and control, and fabrication.This section describes some of the most interesting examples of soft terrestrial and aquatic robots and manipulators that have been built and experimentally tested in the last 20 years
Summary
The most commonly used hard robots are kinematically nonredundant These robots are typically used in well-defined environments in which they repetitively perform a prescribed motion with great precision. Soft robots have distributed deformation with theoretically an infinite number of df This leads to a hyper-redundant configuration space wherein the robot tip can attain every point in the three-dimensional workspace with an infinite number of robot shapes or configurations. They can squeeze through openings smaller than their nominal dimensions This makes them ideal for applications such as personal robots that interact with people without causing injury, service and painting robots that need high dexterity to reach confined spaces, medical robots, especially for use in surgery, and defence and rescue robots that operate in unstructured environments. Robinson and Davies(1999) presented a short review of continuum robots, distinguishing them from discrete (nonredundant) and serpentine (hyper-redundant) robots.
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