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Design and modeling of a novel soft parallel robot driven by endoskeleton pneumatic artificial muscles

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Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Owing to their inherent great flexibility, good compliance, excellent adaptability, and safe interactivity, soft robots have shown great application potential. The advantages of light weight, high efficiency, non-polluting characteristic, and environmental adaptability provide pneumatic soft robots an important position in the field of soft robots. In this paper, a soft robot with 10 soft modules, comprising three uniformly distributed endoskeleton pneumatic artificial muscles, was developed. The robot can achieve flexible motion in 3D space. A novel kinematic modeling method for variable-curvature soft robots based on the minimum energy method was investigated, which can accurately and efficiently analyze forward and inverse kinematics. Experiments show that the robot can be controlled to move to the desired position based on the proposed model. The prototype and modeling method can provide a new perspective for soft robot design, modeling, and control.

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Abbreviations

a t,i :

Position coordinates of the ith muscle endpoint in the tth soft module

d :

Elastic rod diameter

d a :

Side length of the airbag

d r :

Robot diameter

e :

Robot endpoint position error

E :

Young’s modulus

E e :

Elastic strain energy

E p :

External force potential energy

E t :

Total elastic potential energy

e 1, e 2, e 3 :

Unit vectors of the x, y, and z axes, respectively

f g :

Robot gravity

F c :

Load carrying capacity of PAM

f i :

External force of the ith discretized nodes Ni

F :

Internal force

k 1, k 2 :

Flexural stiffnesses of the x and y axes, respectively

k 3 :

Torsional stiffness of the z axis

l_p :

Pneumatic artificial muscle length

L :

Robot length

N i :

The ith discretized nodes

P :

Simulation position of the robot endpoint

P a :

Experimental position of the robot endpoint

P in :

Air pressure inside the PAM

P out :

Atmospheric pressure

r c :

Constraint disk radius

r :

Position vector of the robot discrete nodes

(P 1 P 2 P 3):

Position of the desired point

(α, β, θ):

Euler angles

ϕ :

Relative rotation angle of adjacent coordinate systems

ω :

Derivative of ϕ with respect to arc coordinate s

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51975566, 61821005, and U1908214), and the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS, China (Grant No. ZDBS-LY-JSC011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Peng Chen, Yi Yu & Yuwang Liu

  2. Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110169, China

    Peng Chen, Yi Yu & Yuwang Liu

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Peng Chen & Yi Yu

  4. School of Mechanical Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110000, China

    Tingwen Yuan

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  1. Peng Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuwang Liu.

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Chen, P., Yuan, T., Yu, Y. et al. Design and modeling of a novel soft parallel robot driven by endoskeleton pneumatic artificial muscles. Front. Mech. Eng. 17, 22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-022-0678-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-022-0678-2

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