An Origami-Inspired Flexible Pneumatic Actuator

This paper presents a new actuator designed to produce forces under short stroke displacements. Two variants of the prototype have been manufactured using Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing process, based on a flexible origami-inspired architecture. The structure consists of an airtight chamber constituted by rigid plates combined with flexible hinges and surfaces in order to allow the generation of motion. We propose several insights on integration issues such as limited material resistance and maximum range of motion. Both versions of the prototype are then tested to assess their performances for single strokes and cyclic loading.

[1]  Nikolaus Correll,et al.  Soft Autonomous Materials - Using Active Elasticity and Embedded Distributed Computation , 2010, ISER.

[2]  Bram Vanderborght,et al.  Development of a self-healing soft pneumatic actuator: a first concept. , 2015, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[3]  Hod Lipson,et al.  Automatic Design and Manufacture of Soft Robots , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[4]  Robert J. Wood,et al.  An untethered jumping soft robot , 2014, 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  PaikJamie,et al.  Design and Analysis of a Soft Pneumatic Actuator with Origami Shell Reinforcement , 2016 .

[6]  Jamie Paik,et al.  Design Methodology for Constructing Multimaterial Origami Robots and Machines , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[7]  R. Connelly,et al.  The Bellows conjecture. , 1997 .

[8]  Filip Ilievski,et al.  Soft robotics for chemists. , 2011, Angewandte Chemie.

[9]  A RobertsonMatthew,et al.  Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability , 2017 .

[10]  Tomohiro Tachi,et al.  RIGID-FOLDABLE CYLINDERS AND CELLS , 2013 .

[11]  Tao Liu,et al.  Three-Dimensional Printable Origami Twisted Tower: Design, Fabrication, and Robot Embodiment , 2018, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[12]  Tomohiro Tachi,et al.  Origami tubes assembled into stiff, yet reconfigurable structures and metamaterials , 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[13]  R. Brent Gillespie,et al.  Origami Structured Compliant Actuator (OSCA) , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR).

[14]  Jamie Kyujin Paik,et al.  Soft pneumatic actuators for legged locomotion , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO 2014).

[15]  Juan Cristóbal Zagal,et al.  Design, fabrication and control of a multi-material-multi-actuator soft robot inspired by burrowing worms , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO).

[16]  G. Whitesides,et al.  Pneumatic Networks for Soft Robotics that Actuate Rapidly , 2014 .

[17]  Yi Sun,et al.  Characterization of silicone rubber based soft pneumatic actuators , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[18]  Kaspar Althoefer,et al.  A Novel Concept for Safe, Stiffness-Controllable Robot Links. , 2017, Soft robotics.

[19]  Kon-Well Wang,et al.  Fluidic origami: a plant-inspired adaptive structure with shape morphing and stiffness tuning , 2015 .

[20]  Pierre Renaud,et al.  Toward unibody robotic structures with integrated functions using multimaterial additive manufacturing: Case study of an MRI-compatible interventional device , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[21]  R. J. Wood,et al.  An Origami-Inspired Approach to Worm Robots , 2013, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[22]  Jian S. Dai,et al.  Repelling-Screw Based Force Analysis of Origami Mechanisms , 2016 .

[23]  G. Whitesides,et al.  Elastomeric Origami: Programmable Paper‐Elastomer Composites as Pneumatic Actuators , 2012 .