Shibo Cai, Zetong Li, Xing Fang, Qinghua Yang, and Guanjun Bao
Soft robot, variable stiffness, soft actuator, meshing
Compared with conversional rigid robots, soft robots have attracted wide and intensive interests owing to their unique feature of softness. However, stiffness is expected, and researchers attempt to explore their applications in many fields. We proposed a novel pneumatic soft actuator with variable stiffness, whose mechanism lies in a double-pipe structure with nestable teeth. The stiffness of the structure can be regulated by the meshing engagement of the teeth on the inner and outer pipes. Based on the theory of Timoshenko beam and the piecewise-integration method, a concise and feasible mathematical model was established to represent its stiffness, which was verified by finite element analysis. Experimental analysis proved the proposed soft-actuator structure and its stiffness model.
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