An octopus arm with a flexible structure and no rigid skeleton shows a high degree of\nfreedom and flexibility. These excellent features are suitable for working in an environment having\nfragile and unknown-shaped objects. Therefore, a soft robot arm resembling an octopus arm can be\nuseful as a harvesting machine without damaging crops in the agricultural field, as a rehabilitation\napparatus in the welfare field, as a safe surgery tool in the medical field, and so on. Unlike industrial\nrobots, to consider the applications of the soft robot arm, the instructions for it relating to a task\ncannot in many cases be given as a numerical value, and the motion according to an operatorâ??s sense\nand intent is useful. This paper describes the design and feedback control of a soft master-slave\nrobot system. The system is configured with two soft rubber machines; one is a slave machine that is\nthe soft robot arm mimicking the muscle arrangement of the octopus arm by pneumatic artificial\nmuscles, and the other is a master machine that gives the target motion to the slave machine. Both are\nconfigured with soft materials. The slave machine has an actuating part and a sensing part, it can\nperform bending and torsional motions, and these motions are estimated by the sensing part with\nthreads that connect to wire encoders. The master machine is almost the same configuration, but it has\nno actuating part. The slave machine is driven according to the deformation of the master machine.\nWe confirmed experimentally that the slave machine followed the master machine that was deformed\nby an operator.
Loading....