Utilizing Anisotropic Fabrics Composites for High-Strength Soft Manipulator Integrating Soft Gripper

Abstract

Fabrics are promising materials to realize the high-strength soft robots as they are anisotropic, stretchable, and intrinsically high strength. Exploiting these properties, here we present the design and test of novel high-strength hydraulic soft manipulator modules composited different type of fabrics. The morphology of manipulator entirety is designed into an elephant's nose shape with three fabric-based soft actuators and a fiber-reinforced soft gripper with three fingers. The multi-degree of freedom of soft manipulator by filling different pressure into three actuators makes the gripper adaptable to gripping objects of various shapes, stiffness, and weights within a certain range. The soft manipulator modules are tested to characterize its workspace, torque output, and rotational stiffness. Gripping function tests are also conducted to estimate the achieved degree of functions of the gripper. Functional tests verify that the proposed soft manipulator and gripper has achieved expectations, so, it has great potential applications in production and daily life.