Abstract
This short paper presents a preliminary investigation into the implementation of a controllable variable stiffening mechanism, which is achieved through the twisting of tendons around the central axis of a soft actuator. The gradual stiffening effect is realised through the increase in friction between the tendons as those are twisted against each other. This enables an easy to control variable stiffness actuator which is driven through the rotation of a DC motor driving the tendon twisting. The proposed mechanism was integrated within the core of a soft pneumatic actuator based on the STIFF-FLOP design, in order to characterise the increase in stiffness per twist angle for three different tendon materials. The initial experimental results presented here demonstrated that a controllable stiffening effect can be achieved using this technique, which shows dependency on the choice of tendon material. The results also highlighted the impact of braiding the softer tendons to potentially enhance stiffening, although further experimentation is necessary to characterise this behaviour in more detail.
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King, W., Pooley, L., Johnson, P., Elgeneidy, K. (2021). Design and Characterisation of a Variable Stiffness Soft Actuator Based on Tendon Twisting. In: Fox, C., Gao, J., Ghalamzan Esfahani, A., Saaj, M., Hanheide, M., Parsons, S. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13054. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89177-0_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89177-0_42
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