Design of a Hall effect sensor controlled brittle star inspired composite robotic limb

Abstract

Abstract This paper elucidates a method of actuation and feedback for hard-soft composite continuum pentapod appendages to enable both kinematic accuracy and gait. A feedback mechanism based on Hall effect sensors is integrated within a hard exterior/soft interior composite robotic limb, which is unaffected by actuator slippage, and provides accurate (sub 2°) end point measurements. The proposed method for actuation uses two actuators to control a full semi-spherical range of motion, an improvement to the use of three actuators more commonly reported in the literature. When applied to enable the gait of a complete brittle star inspired pentapod, we find that our design reaches a momentum of 0.52 kg · m s −1 , surpassing the momentum of previously reported untethered starfish inspired pentapods by 3.7 times.