A Reconfigurable Pneumatic Joint Enabling Localized Selective Stiffening and Shape Locking in Vine-Inspired Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reconfigurable pneumatic joint for vine-inspired robots that enables localized stiffening and shape locking, improving load capacity and shape retention during navigation and manipulation tasks.

Contribution

The authors present a novel pressure-tunable pneumatic joint that decouples global compliance from local rigidity in soft growing robots, enhancing their functional capabilities.

Findings

The RPJ achieves effective localized stiffening with moderate pressure.

The robot demonstrates improved shape retention and load-bearing capacity.

Payload transport up to 202 g in free space is reliably achieved.

Abstract

Vine-inspired robots achieve large workspace coverage through tip eversion, enabling safe navigation in confined and cluttered environments. However, their deployment in free space is fundamentally limited by low axial stiffness, poor load-bearing capacity, and the inability to retain shape during and after steering. In this work, we propose a reconfigurable pneumatic joint (RPJ) architecture that introduces discrete, pressure-tunable stiffness along the robot body without compromising continuous growth. Each RPJ module comprises symmetrically distributed pneumatic chambers that locally increase bending stiffness when pressurized, enabling decoupling between global compliance and localized rigidity. We integrate the RPJs into a soft growing robot with tendon-driven steering and develop a compact base station for mid-air eversion. System characterization and experimental validation demonstrate moderate pressure requirements for eversion, as well as comparable localized stiffening and steering performance to layer-jamming mechanisms. Demonstrations further show that the proposed robot achieves improved shape retention during bending, reduced gravitational deflection under load, cascading retraction, and reliable payload transport up to 202 g in free space. The RPJ mechanism establishes a practical pathway toward structurally adaptive vine robots for manipulation-oriented tasks such as object sorting and adaptive exploration in unconstrained environments.