Abstract
Flexible robotic manipulators have been widely used in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and many other applications requiring closer inspection and operation. Although a variety of manipulators enabled by different mechanism have been developed, few of them can preserve softness, thinness and decent bending capability simultaneously. We develop miniature soft robotic manipulators made of hyper-elastic silicone rubber. Along with the manipulator design, novel fabrication methods are proposed and elaborated. Detailed characterizations are specified to show the bending capability of the manipulator given different air pressure. Specifically, our manipulator, as thin as 6 mm, is able to achieve 360° directional bending, and, when given pressure over 70kPa, it can reach 180° bending angle and around 5mm bending radius easily. Due to its innate compliance and small dimension, this type of robotic manipulator can deliver safe and comfortable interactions with the subjects. More significantly, the novel fabrications in this paper diversify the fabrication methods for soft pneumatic robots and actuators (SPRA) and further scale down their sizes.
Video demo
Publications
- Y. Sun; S. Song; X. Liang & H. Ren A Miniature Soft Robotic Manipulator Based on Novel Fabrication Methods IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2016, 1, 617-623
- Y. Sun; C. M. Lim; H. H. Tan & H. Ren Soft oral interventional rehabilitation robot based on low-profile soft pneumatic actuator ICRA2015, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 26-30 May, Seattle, Washington, USA, 2015, 2907-2912
- Y. Sun & H. Ren Soft Transnasal Endoscopic Robot for Patient-administered Nasopharynx Inspection Journal of Medical Devices – Transactions of the ASME (Technical Brief), 2015
- H. Yu; Y. Sun; F. Bai & H. Ren A preliminary study of force estimation based on surface EMG: Towards neuromechanically guided soft oral rehabilitation robot ICORR 2015, 14th edition of the IEEE/RAS-EMBS International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, 2015, 991-996
- X. Liang; Y. Sun; H. WANG; N. Thakor; C.-H. Yeow; S. Kukreja & H. REN Delicate Manipulations with Soft Compliant Mechanism and Electrostatic Adhesion BioRob2016, 6th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, June 26-29, 2016, Singapore, 2016
