Design of an inherently safe worm-like robot

Abstract

Nowadays robots are disseminated more and more in fields where humans are in the loop. These collaborative modes are always characterized by safety issues, in particular problems regarding compliance in case of contact. Our approach to solve these problems is based on passive compliance, which means that an inherently flexible robotic mechanism is designed driven by pneumatic artificial muscles (PAM). Compared to state of the art robots the novelty here is a completely modular and decentralized setup in terms of both mechanical and control architecture. Main benefit of this new design is expandability and increased precision. This paper presents the design and control of a robot of this kind with 3 segments or rather 6 degrees of freedom (DOF), which proves the novel concept.