Design And Control Of Soft Manipulators Based On Pneumatic Actuators

In recent years,soft robotics based on soft smart material has developed rapidly.Bioinspired by living organism,many robots with high degree of freedoms have been developed.Compared with traditional rigid robots,these soft robots can inherently provide adaptable morphology in response to environmental changes and produce sophisticated motions with simple controls,which makes them have great potential value in automation,medicine and military domains.One of the core techniques of soft robotics is the soft actuator technique.Pneumatic actuators are of particular interest because they have many advantages,such as high compliance,high power to weight ratio and easy fabrication with emerging digital fabrication techniques.This thesis focuses on the design and fabrication of pneumatic actuators.Using these actuators,three types of soft manipulators have been developed.The significant potential of pneumatic soft actuators is currently limited by their nonlinear kinematic responses.In this paper,finite element analysis was used as a design tool to find the optimal geometric parameters for two typical pneumatic soft bending actuators which have received significant research attention recently.Combined with the simulation results,molding method is used to fabricate actuators.The control system has been accomplished for achieving multiple actuators control.Every single actuator can realize bending,maintaining and extending with the help of the designed control system.Three soft manipulators including soft automate gripper,soft hand and soft rehabilitation glove were developed based on the research results.The soft automate gripper has a strong adaptive ability.Cooperated with UR robot arm,it can grasp different kinds of objects.Combined with data glove or EMG band,the soft hand can display dexterous actions similar as the human hand.The open-palm designed soft rehabilitation glove can help hand functional disordered patients do active training.At last,the visual interface was developed to facilitate the display of soft hand and the application of soft rehabilitation glove.According to this research,a better understanding of the relationship between the typical pneumatic soft bending actuators and their structure parameters has been obtained and three soft manipulator systems based on these bending actuators have been developed.These research results will have a positive effect on the application and further development of soft robotics in the future.