Segmentation of a Soft Body and its Bending Performance using Thin McKibben Muscle

Abstract

In recent years, soft actuator has been extensively developed in robotic research. This type of robot is expected to work with human with its flexible and adaptable advantage. The actuator material is soft, light, safe and high compliant. Due to these factors, soft McKibben is of interest as an actuator for this research for bending application. This paper introduces a variant bending analysis of a soft body manipulated using soft McKibben actuators. A series of 1.80 mm width with the length of 120.0 mm McKibben actuator is used to control the bending motion. The design consists of four McKibben actuators arranged in parallel and compacted in a soft body. The bending behavior was evaluated using an experimental test with a variety of pneumatic input pressure and length section on the actuator. The experiment showed that the bending angle was influenced by the segmentation length of the actuator, where the segmentation length and increased input pressure also allow more bending on the actuator. The actuator with lot of section gave more bending response compared to the actuator with lesser section. With the performance exhibited from this study, McKibben actuator can be applied in a wider use for continuum manipulator.