TY - JOUR
T1 - Design, Fabrication, and Validation of a New Family of 3D-Printable Structurally-Programmable Actuators for Soft Robotics
AU - Altelbani, Ahmed
AU - Zhou, Haoran
AU - Mehrdad, Sarmad
AU - Alambeigi, Farshid
AU - Atashzar, S. Farokh
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 24, 2021; accepted July 13, 2021. Date of publication August 4, 2021; date of current version August 17, 2021. This material is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grant No 2037878. (Ahmed Altelbani, Haoran Zhou, and Sarmad Mehrdad contributed equally to this work.) (Corresponding author: S. Farokh Atashzar.) Ahmed Altelbani and Haoran Zhou are with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, New York University (NYU), Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA (e-mail: ama1059@nyu.edu; hz2206@nyu.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2021/10
Y1 - 2021/10
N2 - Soft robots have shown great potential for manufacturing exoskeletons, prostheses, and surgical robots. In this paper, we propose the concept of programmable soft robotics and will experimentally evaluate the performance in the context of continuum mechanisms. The proposed novel concept is motivated by the mechanical shape of RNA molecules which has a single-stranded polymeric molecule with a sugar-phosphate backbone and nitrogenous bases. The shape of the RNA and the type, location, and characteristics of the bases define the coded information. Due to the complexity of RNA, the proposed robot cannot be considered a 'bio-inspired' design. Instead, we indirectly utilize the concept of encoding sequences and introduce a new family of soft continuum robots based on a novel design of 3D printable 'mechanical library' and 'embedded functions' to be implemented on the backbone structure for mechanical programming. Through structural coding of the bases, the paper proposed a wide range of continuum robots. The system has the potential to be scaled up for multiple degrees of freedom (DOF), while the dexterity and range can be structurally programmed. A set of three soft continuum systems are designed, simulated, manufactured. The performance is evaluated by comparing simulations and experiments. We observed that actuators have different hysteresis ranging from 7.50% to 38.36% (on average) with a standard deviation ranging from 5.56% to 40.72%. The results highlight the effect of inherent pneumatic delay causing the hysteresis loops, which should be considered for control.
AB - Soft robots have shown great potential for manufacturing exoskeletons, prostheses, and surgical robots. In this paper, we propose the concept of programmable soft robotics and will experimentally evaluate the performance in the context of continuum mechanisms. The proposed novel concept is motivated by the mechanical shape of RNA molecules which has a single-stranded polymeric molecule with a sugar-phosphate backbone and nitrogenous bases. The shape of the RNA and the type, location, and characteristics of the bases define the coded information. Due to the complexity of RNA, the proposed robot cannot be considered a 'bio-inspired' design. Instead, we indirectly utilize the concept of encoding sequences and introduce a new family of soft continuum robots based on a novel design of 3D printable 'mechanical library' and 'embedded functions' to be implemented on the backbone structure for mechanical programming. Through structural coding of the bases, the paper proposed a wide range of continuum robots. The system has the potential to be scaled up for multiple degrees of freedom (DOF), while the dexterity and range can be structurally programmed. A set of three soft continuum systems are designed, simulated, manufactured. The performance is evaluated by comparing simulations and experiments. We observed that actuators have different hysteresis ranging from 7.50% to 38.36% (on average) with a standard deviation ranging from 5.56% to 40.72%. The results highlight the effect of inherent pneumatic delay causing the hysteresis loops, which should be considered for control.
KW - Exoskeletons
KW - human-robot interaction
KW - medical robotics
KW - rehabilitation robotics
KW - soft robotics
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U2 - 10.1109/LRA.2021.3101860
DO - 10.1109/LRA.2021.3101860
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85112660393
VL - 6
SP - 7942
EP - 7949
JO - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
JF - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
SN - 2377-3766
IS - 4
M1 - 9507087
ER -