The Multi-section Design of a Novel Soft Pneumatic Robot Arm with Variable Stiffness

Abstract

By using flexible material, there are lots of researches on soft robot arm for taking its advantages. Compare with conventional rigid manipulator, soft robot arm can provide dexterity, safety and light weight. Besides upon unique characteristics, researchers also focused on solving its disadvantages like weak stiffness. This paper introduces a novel soft pneumatic robot arm with multi-section serially connection and variable stiffness by coupling structure. One-section arm consists of two connecting plates on the upper and bottom, three motion air chambers between in the plates and variable stiffness air chamber in the middle. There are three fields: static mechanical modeling, kinematic tests and variable stiffness analysis in this paper to demonstrate the design can be a solution to overcome current limitation of soft robot arms. Also, this paper evaluates the kinematic and mechanical characteristics through experiments and finally the validity of this multi-section and variable stiffness design in couple approach is proved.