Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of a Helical Twisting, Contracting, and Bending Fabric Soft Continuum Actuator

Abstract

In recent years, soft robots have demonstrated the capability for delicate and compliant interactions with objects, users, and unstructured environments. These soft robotic systems are bio-inspired from various examples like snakes, hydrostatic muscles in elephants and octopi, plant tendrils, etc. These soft actuation systems, like their biological counterpart have shown the ability to replicate natural movement, making them potentially effective in real world use cases. In this paper, we propose a new fabric-based soft continuum actuator with three chambers capable of helical twisting and simultaneous linear contraction as well as bending in multi-DOF. We characterize the performance of the system based on their geometrical parameters and preliminarily evaluate the system as a bionic winding manipulator and a soft robot arm.