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Title: Validation of an Extensible Rod Model for Soft continuum Manipulators
Numerous soft and continuum robotic manipulators have demonstrated their potential for compliant operation in highly unstructured environments or near people. Despite their recent popularity, modeling of their smooth bending deformation remains a challenge. For soft continuum manipulators, the widespread, constant curvature approach to modeling is inadequate for modeling some deformations that occur in practice, such as combined bending and twisting deformations. In this paper, we extend the classical Cosserat rod approach to model a variable-length, pneumatic soft continuum arm. We model the deformation of a pneumatically driven soft continuum manipulator, and the model is then compared against experimental data collected from a three degree of freedom, pneumatically actuated, soft continuum manipulator. The model shows good agreement in capturing the overall behavior of the bending deformation, with mean Euclidean error at the tip of the robot of 2.48 cm for a 22 cm long robot. In addition, the model shows good numerical stability for simulating long duration computations.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1718755
PAR ID:
10109163
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2019 2nd IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
711 to 716
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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