Abstract
Some applications are very sensitive to the weight of the robot, such as space manipulation or any untethered mobile manipulation. In this article, we designed a five-module unilaterally bending serial manipulator with length of 32 cm and a weight of only 18 g. The manipulator is driven by dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs). Each module consists of a spatially closed tubular structure, which has the capability of large deformation while simultaneously maintaining torsional rigidity. The design is based on the buckling of columns. To achieve global deformation continuously, each module was controlled independently by a multichannel high-voltage power supply. As a demo, the manipulator was able to enter and exit a narrow L-shaped pipe. Experiments demonstrate that the manipulator driven by spatial DEAs can be super lightweight and can realize large continuous deformation.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
