Modeling of Soft Fiber-Reinforced Bending Actuators

By Panagiotis Polygerinos, Zheng Wang, Johannes T. B. Overvelde, Kevin C. Galloway, Robert J. Wood, Katia Bertoldi, Conor James Walsh. IEEE Transactions on robotics, 2015

809 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soft fluidic actuators consisting of elastomeric matrices with embedded flexible materials are of particular interest to the robotics community because they are affordable and can be easily customized to a given application. However, the significant potential of such actuators is currently limited as their design has typically been based on intuition. In this paper, the principle of operation of these actuators is comprehensively analyzed and described through experimentally validated quasi-static analytical and finite-element method models for bending in free space and force generation when in contact with an object. This study provides a set of systematic design rules to help the robotics community create soft actuators by understanding how these vary their outputs as a function of input pressure for a number of geometrical parameters. Additionally, the proposed analytical model is implemented in a controller demonstrating its ability to convert pressure information to bending angle in real time. Such an understanding of soft multimaterial actuators will allow future design concepts to be rapidly iterated and their performance predicted, thus enabling new and innovative applications that produce more complex motions to be explored.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0859c90e5a4d60c5816d4af562efe6f911a0b5b

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In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Learning dexterous manipulation for a soft robotic hand from human demonstrations (2016, methodology): “Modelling and simulating the behavior of a soft hand like the RBO Hand 2 is computationally expensive, since it requires ﬁnite-element method models [9] to achieve accuracy.”
Hydraulic hydrogel actuators and robots optically and sonically camouflaged in water (2017, positive): “To investigate the strain and stress distribution and the actuation time and force of hydraulic hydrogel actuators, we built 3D ﬁnite element models using a commercial ﬁnite element software ABAQUS 6.14 based on the previously reported approaches 24,34,35 .”
An Overview of Novel Actuators for Soft Robotics (2018, methodology): “A alytical models were also us d i Reference [24] to capture the xplicit relationship between input pressure, bendi g angl , and out force with spec al emphasis on the actuator geometry.”
Feedback Control of Soft Robot Actuators via Commercial Flex Bend Sensors (2017, neutral): “systems [7], [8].”
Interaction Forces of Soft Fiber Reinforced Bending Actuators (2017, methodology): “Based on the discussions of free-space motion in [40], in this study, we extend the moment equilibrium to consider interaction forces at the actuator tip.”
Soft Robotic Grippers for Biological Sampling on Deep Reefs (2016, background): “19 The design and actuation of the compliant underwater gripper demonstrated by Stanford are similar to the shape deposition manufactured hand developed at Harvard, using a single tendon to drive each ﬁnger and coupling the rigid polymer phalanges of each ﬁnger with elastomeric ﬂexure joints.”
High-Force Soft Printable Pneumatics for Soft Robotic Applications (2016, neutral): “19,23,34 The constraint allowed the load cell to capture the maximum initial tip force exerted by the actuators upon air pressurization.”