Analysis and initial experiments for a novel elephant's trunk robot

Abstract

The idea of studying tentacle and trunk type biological manipulation is not new, but there has been little progress in the development and application of physical devices to simulate these types of manipulation. Our research in this area is centered on a novel elephant trunk robot. We review the construction of the robot and how it compares to biological manipulators. We then apply our previously designed kinematic model to describe the kinematics of the robot. We finish by providing some examples of intelligent manipulation using the robot.