Design and Analysis of a Biomimetic Wire-Driven Robot Arm

Abstract

Inspired by the octopus and snakes, we designed and built a wire-driven serpentine robot arm. The robot arm is made of a number of rigid nodes connected by two sets of wires. The rigid nodes act as the backbone while the wires work as the muscle, which enables the 2 DOF bending. The forward kinematics is derived using D-H method, while the inverse kinematics and its workspace can be solved by geometric analysis. To validate the design, a prototype is built. It is found that the positioning error of the robot arm is generally less than 2%. The advantage of this robot arm is that with several nodes fixed the rest nodes are still controllable. The positioning error is smaller when the fixed node is closer to the end effector.