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Self-Pumping Actuation Module and its Application in Untethered Soft Robots

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Abstract

Pneumatically driven soft actuators have been widely used in soft material robotics. However, soft pneumatic actuators are usually tethered to a rigid pump or compressor, which is complicated, cumbersome and noisy. In this study, we present a novel self-pumping actuation module which is composed of a soft origami pump, two soft pneumatic actuators, a servo motor, a controller and battery. During a working cycle, the soft pump is compressed or restored by pulling or releasing the tendons using the servo motor. As a consequence, the pneumatic actuators connected to the pump generate bending and restoring deformations. Moreover, the air flow inside the proposed module is closed-loop without exchanging air with the environment, making it possible to operation in certain scenarios such as in underwater or vacuum conditions, the advantage of our designed self-pumping actuation module is to recycle air without relying on a large rigid air pump. Theoretical model of the self-pumping actuation module is derived and its performance is characterized via several experiments. The maximum bending speed by the soft actuator is 239.2° s−1, the maximum compression speed of origami pump is 38.2 mm s−1, the maximum pressure inside the pump is 48 kPa, the maximum internal flow rate of pump is 11.5 L min−1, and the maximum torque of actuator is 0.0455 N·m. A soft robotic gripper, a fully untethered quadrupedal soft swimming robot and a rehabilitation glove are fabricated to show the superiority of the proposed design over traditional pneumatically actuated soft robots.

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Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52005269) and the Research Project of State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration MSV202319.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Yang Yang, Yuan Xie & Jia Liu

  2. Jiangsu Province Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Meteorological Exploration Robot, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Yang Yang, Yuan Xie & Jia Liu

  3. College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China

    Pei Jiang

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Yonghua Chen

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yang Yang, Yuan Xie and Pei Jiang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yang Yang, Jia Liu, Yonghua Chen. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yang Yang or Jia Liu.

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Yang, Y., Xie, Y., Liu, J. et al. Self-Pumping Actuation Module and its Application in Untethered Soft Robots. J Intell Robot Syst 108, 16 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-023-01892-5

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