Novel Technique to Increase the Effective Workspace of a Soft Robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to expand the workspace of a soft robot by increasing its equilibrium configurations without adding actuators or changing its structure.

Contribution

A novel technique is proposed to increase the workspace of tensegrity robots by increasing contact points without modifying rigid elements or adding actuators.

Findings

The proposed modification increases the number of geometric equilibrium configurations by 23.369%.

Numerical experiments using ANSYS® R18.2 validated the effectiveness of the new technique.

The method allows for scaling tensegrity robots without altering their fundamental design.

Abstract

This article presents a novel technique for a class 2 tensegrity robot, also classified as a soft robot, to increase workspace by increasing the number of geometric equilibrium configurations of the robot. The proposed modification, unlike the strategies reported in the literature, consists of increasing the number of points where the flexible and rigid elements that make up the robot come into contact without the need to increase the number of actuators, the number of flexible elements, or modify the geometry of the rigid elements. The form-finding methodology combines the basic principles of statics with the direct and inverse kinematic position analysis to determine the number of equilibrium positions of the modified robot. In addition, numerical experiments were carried out using the commercial software ANSYS®, R18.2 based on the finite element theory, to corroborate the results obtained with them. With the proposed modification, an increase of 23.369% in the number of geometric equilibrium configurations is achieved, which integrates the workspace of the modified class 2 tensegrity robot. The novel technique applied to tensegrity robots and the tools developed to increase their workspace apply perfectly to scale the robots presented in this paper.

Figures