15 May 2023
Soft grippers, continuum medical robots, soft robotic arms, and other soft robots are designed to be flexible and compliant, allowing them to interact safely with humans and adapt to their environment.
In their paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2023), EMERGE partners from the Delft University of Technology (NL) and collaborators discuss recent research progress for a new type of soft robot called Handed Shearing Auxetics (HSAs) that can rapidly change shape while remaining flexible.
HSAs are a type of actuator that can directly transform applied motor torques into complex motion primitives such as elongation, bending, and twisting, allowing for rapid actuation while preserving structural compliance making them well-suited for applications where safe interaction with humans is important.
The researchers have come up with two new ways to better understand and model these robots. The first is a way to simulate the behaviour of the material in a computer program, which they have implemented as a plugin for the Elastica simulation software. The second is a way to describe the shape of the robot using fewer variables, which they call Selective Piecewise Constant Strain (SPCS) kinematic parameterisation. Both of these ideas were tested and found to be accurate. The simulator was used to replicate experimental data, and motion capture markers were attached to a parallel HSA robot to verify the accuracy of the proposed kinematic shape model. In the future, this research could help improve the control and performance of HSA robots, making them even more useful in the soft robotics field.
Source: M. Stölzle, L. Chin, R. L. Truby, D. Rus and C. D. Santina, "Modelling Handed Shearing Auxetics: Selective Piecewise Constant Strain Kinematics and Dynamic Simulation," 2023 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), Singapore, Singapore, 2023, pp. 1-8, DOI: 10.1109/RoboSoft55895.2023.10121989.
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