Integrated Design of a Robotic Bio-Inspired Trunk
Tanguy Chevillon, Steeve Mbakop, Gilles Tagne, Rochdi Merzouki
Abstract
Soft-Continuum Manipulators are of increasing interest to researchers for various non-destructive applications (minimally invasive surgery, fibroscopy, oncology, pipe exploration and many others). They are made with soft material or special arrangement of actuators allowing them to exhibit resilience and dexterity. The concept of Proprioceptive Soft-Continuum Manipulators still remains a major challenge for soft roboticists due to the big issues related to manufacturing process which becomes very expensive including sophisticated or experimental tools, highly skilled technicians and time. However, the manipulator proprioception is very usefull for enhancing the dexterity during their manipulation. Henceforth, this paper investigates a quick and simple approach for the integrated design of a proprioceptive Soft Robotic Bio- Inspired Trunk made with dragon skin 30 Material. This soft manipulator is made up of two segments composed of three independent physical control inputs each. It has an embedded electronics mainly composed of IMUs. The latter have allowed controlling the shape kinematics using a control-oriented modeling approach inspired from the kinematics control of a puppet toy. The developed modeling approach is a Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) which uses Pythagorean Hodograph (PH) curves which lowers in real time, the control dimension of the robot to virtual control points of its representative PH curve. The proposed investigation presents also a comprehensive approach for the manufacturing process of Soft-Continuum Manipulators with complex geometry.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2023_integrateddesign,
title = {Integrated Design of a Robotic Bio-Inspired Trunk},
author = {Tanguy Chevillon and Steeve Mbakop and Gilles Tagne and Rochdi Merzouki},
booktitle = {IROS 2023},
year = {2023}
}