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Design and Experiment of a Foldable Pneumatic Soft Manipulator

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11742))

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a design of a foldable pneumatic soft manipulator. The soft manipulator is made up of three foldable pneumatic soft modules, which are stacked in series. The foldable pneumatic soft module is composed with a pneumatic actuator and an inflatable beam. The function of the pneumatic actuator is to make the directional movement, while the inflatable beam is the section with foldability. In order to get the performance of this kind of design, one of the soft modules is developed. Moreover, the pulling force of the pneumatic actuator, the bending stiffness of the inflatable beam and the pointing movement of the soft module are tested in the experiment. The concept of the foldability and extension of the soft manipulator is also validated.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the fundings by the Postdoctoral Science Foundation and the Natural Science Foundation of China, under Grants No. 11702320, 11725211 and 61690213.

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Correspondence to Xiang Zhang .

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Zhang, X., Liu, Z., Liu, H., Cao, L., Chen, X., Huang, Y. (2019). Design and Experiment of a Foldable Pneumatic Soft Manipulator. In: Yu, H., Liu, J., Liu, L., Ju, Z., Liu, Y., Zhou, D. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11742. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27535-8_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27535-8_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27534-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27535-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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