Reducing Actuators in Soft Continuum Robots and Manipulators

Soft Actuators and Robots that Are Resistant to Mechanical Damage

Robots based on rigid structural elements—metallic skeletons, electrical motors, conventional mechanical actuators, and mechanical joints—can be superb at performing tasks that require high precision, rapid movement, or application of high levels of force or power. These “hard” robots are, however, often heavy, costly, and diffi cult (and expensive) to control. [ 1–3 ] Hard robots designed to b...

Reducing Actuator Requirements in Continuum Robots Through Optimized Cable Routing.

Continuum manipulators offer many advantages compared to their rigid-linked counterparts, such as increased degrees of freedom and workspace volume. Inspired by biological systems, such as elephant trunks and octopus tentacles, many continuum manipulators are made of multiple segments that allow large-scale deformations to be distributed throughout the body. Most continuum manipulators currentl...

"Soft" Continuum Robots - the Interaction of Continuous and Discrete Elements

In this paper, we examine key issues underlying the design and operation of “soft” robots featuring continuous body (“continuum”) elements. We contrast continuum and continuum-like robots created to date with their counterparts in the natural world. It is observed that natural continuum locomotors or manipulators almost invariably rely on hard/discrete elements (in their structure and/or ...

Polypyrrole Soft Actuators

Theory and Practice of Robots and Manipulators (

In this paper the improvement of a preliminary design process based on an iterative and interactive synthesis is proposed. The problem concerns the determination of dimentionnal parameters of a manipulator able to follow a trajectory deened by a parametric curve under kinematic performances (requested velocity at end-eeector level in a clutured environment). A two level optimization process all...