Modular Design And Research Of A Kind Of Pneumatic Soft Robot

Soft robots are mainly made of soft materials,which have good environmental adaptability and safe Human–Machine Interaction.Pneumatic soft robot has been widely used in the life because it's easy driving.This paper has launched the modular design and research of pneumatic soft robots.The pneumatic soft robots can be assembled to meet the various requirements by using different kinds of modular actuators.Firstly,three kinds of pneumatic soft actuators,i.e.single-chamber elongating actuator,double-chamber bending actuator and single-chamber expanding actuator,are designed with modular design idea.In this paper,finite element analysis software has been used to verify the feasibility of inflatable deformation of actuators,and the influence of the geometrical dimensions of the actuators on their deformation performance has been analyzed.Combined with the relationship between the work done by driving pressure and the strain energy change of hyperelastic materials,the kinematics models of the actuators have been built.And the relationship between the geometric dimensions of the cavity and the deformation performance of the actuators has been obtained via the kinematic models,which is consistent with the FEM simulation,which proves the validity of the kinematics model.After that,combined with the design requirements of modular pneumatic soft robot and the influence of the cavity geometry size of the actuators,the geometric sizes of three types of pneumatic soft actuators have been determined.In this paper,a number of separate silicone rubber injection moulds have been designed,and Ecoflex 00-50 silicone rubber has been used to manufacture the actuators.Driving deformation experiments have been carried out on the actuators,and the deformation data of the actuators have been measured.The experimental results show the kinematics model can predict the deformation of the actuators well.Finally,three kinds of actuators have been applied to design modular pneumatic soft robots suitable for ground crawling and pipeline crawling.And adjustable drive of the robot has been realized with the kinematics models built in chapter 3.The modular pneumatic soft robot experiment platform has been built,which can realize multi-channel controllable air pressure output.Each pneumatic output can independently or cooperatively control the modular actuators,so as to control the pneumatic soft robot.In this paper,the motion performances of several kinds of pneumatic soft robots have been compared via experiments.