Design, Manufacturing, and Open-Loop Control of a Soft Pneumatic Arm

Design, Manufacturing, and Open-Loop Control of a Soft Pneumatic Arm

17 January 2024 | Jorge Francisco García-Samartín, Adrián Rieker and Antonio Barrientos
This paper presents the design, manufacturing, and open-loop control of a pneumatic soft robot named PAUL (Pneumatic Articulated Ultrasoft Limb). PAUL consists of three independently actuated segments, each with three degrees of freedom, enabling motion across three spatial dimensions. The segments are made of tin-cured silicone and fabricated using a wax-casting method refined through iterative processes. The pneumatic actuation is achieved by inflating bladders within the segments, and an open-loop control system is developed empirically to correlate valve opening times with the robot's position and orientation. The paper includes rigorous testing and discusses the bending ability, weight-carrying capacity, and potential applications of PAUL. The workspace analysis and performance of the table-based models are also discussed, showing that the direct kinematic model has an average error of 4.27 mm and the inverse kinematic model has an average error of 10.78 mm.This paper presents the design, manufacturing, and open-loop control of a pneumatic soft robot named PAUL (Pneumatic Articulated Ultrasoft Limb). PAUL consists of three independently actuated segments, each with three degrees of freedom, enabling motion across three spatial dimensions. The segments are made of tin-cured silicone and fabricated using a wax-casting method refined through iterative processes. The pneumatic actuation is achieved by inflating bladders within the segments, and an open-loop control system is developed empirically to correlate valve opening times with the robot's position and orientation. The paper includes rigorous testing and discusses the bending ability, weight-carrying capacity, and potential applications of PAUL. The workspace analysis and performance of the table-based models are also discussed, showing that the direct kinematic model has an average error of 4.27 mm and the inverse kinematic model has an average error of 10.78 mm.
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