Kinematics and Statics for Soft Continuum Manipulators With Heterogeneous Soft Materials

Abstract

Continuum manipulators are continuously bending robots with unlimited number of kinematic degrees of freedom. Most existing continuum manipulators have a central strut made of a single elastic material, and multiple cables placed around the strut are employed to actuate the manipulator. The kinematics for such robots has been extensively studied by assuming the manipulator has a circular shape. In this paper, we aim to investigate the kinematic and static modeling for novel soft continuum manipulators fabricated by multi-material 3D printing with heterogeneous soft materials. We model cylindrical shape manipulators consisting of three sections with three different materials, and they are actuated by three independent cables placed symmetrically. By pulling the cables with different displacements, the manipulators can be bent in three-dimensional space. As our initial study, we employ a single cable for all prototypes. Experimental results are compared with the simulation results to validate the proposed modeling method.