Abstract:
Conventional robot manipulators have singularities
in their workspaces and constrained spatial movements. Flexible
and soft robots provide a unique solution to overcome this
limitation. Flexible robot arms have biologically inspired
characteristics as flexible limbs and redundant degrees of
freedom. From these special characteristics, flexible manipulators
are able to develop abilities such as bend, stretch and adjusting
stiffness to traverse a complex maze. Many researchers are
working to improve capabilities of flexible arms by improving the
number of degrees of freedoms and their methodologies. The
proposed flexible robot arm is composed of multiple sections and
each section contains three similar segments and a base segment.
These segments act as the backbone of the basic structure and each
section can be controlled by changing the length of three control
wires. These control wires pass through each segment and are held
in place by springs. This design provides each segment with 2 DOF.
The proposed system single section can be bent 90o with respective
to its centre axis. Kinematics of the flexible robot is derived with
respect to the base segment.
Citation:
K. P. Deashapriya, P. A. G. Sampath, W. M. S. B. Wijekoon, N. D. Jayaweera and A. L. Kulasekera, "Biomimetic flexible robot arm design and kinematic analysis of a novel flexible robot arm," 2016 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon), 2016, pp. 385-390, doi: 10.1109/MERCon.2016.7480172.