Modeling and simulation of a new type of torsion bending soft actuator

Abstract

In recent ten years, with the development of micro and nanometer machining technology, intelligent material driving and sensing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, 3D printing technology, soft robot has become one of the important research directions in the international robot academia. Soft robot has inherent high flexibility, excellent adaptability, good compliance and natural safety interaction. This also makes the soft robot in medical, education, service, rescue, detection, wearable devices and other fields more and more attention, and shows great development potential. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a three-dimensional soft actuator with multiple degrees of freedom. It can realize bending, torsion, swing, elongation and other functions. For the soft actuator, we use the virtual work principle and elastic strain energy to establish the kinematic relationship of torsional deformation. The software ABAQUS is used to simulate the soft actuator by finite element method. The results show that the deformation effect of the soft actuator and the relationship between the torsion performance and the filling pressure are verified.