Design Of Sensitive Soft Actuator And Research On Its Wearable Characteristic

In recent years,scientists have been committed to solve the problems of poor adaptability,low safety and inflexibility of traditional robots by using the natural flexibility,hysteresis and response characteristics of soft materials.Although the research of soft robot has made great progress,some disadvantages such as slow response speed,single motion mode and insufficient application scenarios are still exist.In addition,as an important part of the soft robot,the comprehensive performance and application scenarios of soft robot are greatly determined by the design of soft actuator.Base on this,a novel soft actuator with sensitive response speed,several motion modes and rich application scenarios is designed in this paper.According to motion characteristics of soft actuator such as straight,spiral and curl,a series of innovative application scenarios are proposed in this paper.For example,sensitive control of the bionic hand,wearable rehabilitation gloves,soft mechanical skin,spiral gripper and deformable crawling robot.The design of soft actuator directly affects the performance of itself and the research of the whole application scenarios.Therefore,the material selection and structure design of the soft actuator are completed at the first time.Then the motion process and mechanical property of the soft actuator are tested in detail,including the energy conversion rate,response rate,bending angle and other performance parameters.In the design part of the application scenarios,the soft actuator is applied to the wearable fields in this paper.Firstly,the sensitive control of the bionic hand is realized and the response frequency reaches 2.5 times per second.Secondly,the wearable rehabilitation gloves are designed to assist the rehabilitation treatment of patients' hands.Thirdly,the soft mechanical skin with the response time of 0.3s is innovatively designed,which can be used for wearable shoe covers,motion measuring equipment,package grippers and fast packaging of small items.In addition,a variety of extended application scenarios are designed such as follows: a novel soft spiral actuator which can achieve the lifting and grasping of the object with its own weight about 94 times;a deformable soft crawling robot which can be used for detection of dangerous environment.The innovation of this paper mainly lies in: firstly,the response rate of the soft actuator and the original single motion mode are greatly improved;secondly,several novel application scenarios are designed;thirdly,this work is of great significance to the research of sensitive response,precise control of soft actuators and innovative application scenarios.