Design of Shape Actively Controllable Planar Pneumatic Kirigami Actuator

Abstract

Kirigami structure is featured as changing its shape by deforming its gaps through buckling and torsion. However, the existing Kigrigami structures lack the ability to control the shapes of their gaps actively, which hinders their shape deformation performances. This letter proposes a novel planar pneumatic Kirigami actuator (PKA) whose bidirectional bending deformation can be actively controlled, which gives PKA the ability to mimic various curved surfaces with different Gaussian curvatures. It is achieved by embedding four air chambers into four gap walls that are circumferentially and uniformly distributed on the PKA. Each gap angle can be actively adjusted by inflating its relative air chamber, and the changing of the gap angle causes the adjustment of PKA's local bending deformation. Thus, the bidirectional bending deformation of the PKA is programmable by controlling the air pressures in different chambers. To rapidly predict and control the PKA deformation, a geometry-physics-combined PKA active deformation model is designed. This model can get similar computational accuracy with finite element method (FEM), but 1800 times faster, which well supports real-time applications. Theoretical analysis and experimental results prove that we can make PKA have a good linear relationship between air pressure and PKA deformation by designing reasonable structural parameters. Application of PKA on sucker grippers is given to demonstrate its potential usage.