A practicable approach for stability analysis in soft robotics: A workspace analysis for a real soft robot

Abstract

AbstractSoft robotics is a novel field that has gained importance in recent years. The idea in soft robotics is to use materials with a softness comparable to human tissue. With these materials, soft robots are capable to adapt to their environment without extensive use of a sensor system. This makes them interesting, for example, in rehabilitation or as a surgery tool. Due to their softness, soft robots are typically underactuated, which means that they have a lower number of actuators than degrees of freedom. This softness leads to significant deformation of the initial soft robot configuration when external loads are applied, for example, when carrying a weight. Hence, for practical applications, it is important to determine the workspace of a soft robot especially when the robot carrying an object. For this setup, the deformation of a pneumatically actuated self‐developed soft robot, which carries a weight, was simulated. The workspace was analyzed for different air pressures in the chambers of the soft robot as well as for different applied weights. Analytical equations for the description of the workspace were developed from the results of the simulations. From these equations, the effects of air pressure and weight on the workspace can be efficiently determined. In addition, the influences on different robot configurations (e.g., robots with different lengths) can be directly compared with each other.