Abstract
Supernumerary robotic limbs (SRLs) have great potentials to assist human in daily activities and industrial manufacturing by providing extra limbs. However, current SRLs have heavy and rigid structures that may threaten the operator safety; moreover, their limited degrees of freedom and movement modes are not suitable for complicated tasks. Although soft SRLs have exhibited advantages in structure compliance and flexible manipulation to address these problems, it remains challenging to accurately design the geometrical parameters to adapt to specific tasks, and accurate control is also required to realize the expected movement. Inspired by the biological characteristics of the octopus arm muscle fibers, fiber-reinforced actuators (FRAs) are employed to realize various motions, including extension, expansion, bending, and twisting; multiple FRAs are assembled to implement the SRL to achieve complex movement trajectories. The analytic model of the FRA is established to reveal the relationship between its deformation and geometrical parameters as well as input air pressures, which is validated with finite element simulation. Trajectory and payload optimization algorithms are proposed to optimally design the SRL and its control strategy with meeting the prescribed requirement of movement trajectory and payload capacity. Finally, experiments are conducted to validate the proposed robotic system.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under Grant 52205018, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20220894, the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems (HIT) under Grant SKLRS-2023-KF-25, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant NS2022048, the Nanjing Overseas Scholars Science and Technology Innovation Project under Grant YQR22044, and the Scientific Research Foundation of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics under Grant YAH21004.
Funding
This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 52205018, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20220894, the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems (HIT) under Grant SKLRS-2023-KF-25, the State Key Laboratory of Robotics under Grant 2023-O16, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant NS2022048, the Nanjing Overseas Scholars Science and Technology Innovation Project under Grant YQR22044, and the Scientific Research Foundation of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics under Grant YAH21004.
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All authors contributed to the study, conception, and design. Experiments were conducted by Tianyi Zhang and Mengcheng Zhao. Algorithm coding and data processing were performed by Kaizhen Huang. Supervision and funding management were performed by Jiajun Xu, Xuyan Hou and Youfu Li. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Jiajun Xu. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Xu, J., Zhang, T., Huang, K. et al. A Soft Supernumerary Robotic Limb with Fiber-Reinforced Actuators. J Intell Robot Syst 110, 71 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-024-02102-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-024-02102-6