26 October 2023
Driven by bio-inspiration, many researchers have departed from the classic rigid-robotics paradigm to embrace the inclusion of compliant materials and structures. The elephant trunk is an exemplary embodiment of the vision of soft robotics; absent of bone structure, it can be used for tasks ranging from uprooting trees to delicately plucking individual leaves. Its controllability and workspace are exceedingly high, and the compliance endows elephants with an unrivalled muscular multi-tool on the meter scale. Nature holds many other examples of such large-scale structures which simultaneously offer large range of motions, precision, and compliance including octopus tentacles, snake bodies, and monkey tails.
Notwithstanding the impressive soft robots that seek to imitate these biological examples, animal performances are still unmatched. This is especially the case for larger-scale systems which come close to or exceed the meter scale, where only a few examples exist, all with limited precision and motion capabilities.
The development and use of architectured structures is changing how we design and fabricate soft robots. Instead of relying on the material properties, architectured structures leverage their geometry to control physical and mechanical structural properties.
In this work, EMERGE partners from Delft University of Technology and collaborators propose an architectured structure based on trimmed helicoids that allows for independent regulation of the bending and axial stiffness which facilitates tuneability of the resulting soft robot properties.
By combining these modular trimmed helicoid structures in conjunction with control methods, the authors demonstrate a meter-scale soft manipulator that shows control precision, large workspace, and compliant interactions with the environment. These properties enable the robot to perform complex tasks that leverage robot-human and robot-environment interactions such as human feeding and collaborative object manipulation.
Source: Guan, Q., Stella, F., Della Santina, C. et al. Trimmed helicoids: an architectured soft structure yielding soft robots with high precision, large workspace, and compliant interactions. npj Robot 1, 4 (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s44182-023-00004-7
Access EMERGE publications in the link below.
More Information
