Evolving honeycomb pneumatic finger in bullet physics engine

Abstract

Soft robot is becoming a current focus for its inherently compliance and human-friendly interacting with the real world. But most soft robots are designed and fabricated with intuition and empiricism only, which lack of systematic assessment such as force and deformable analysis before fabricating. Before choosing proper soft materials and processing the craft, the experiments of the soft robots can hardly be set up. In this paper, we construct a model of Honeycomb Pneumatic Finger (HPF) with honeycomb pneumatic network embedded which overcomes the shortcoming of embedded rectangular unit. In the meantime, a pressure analysis model is built for the purpose of physical simulation. Based on the model, without choosing any real materials and fabricating, we focus on exploring the correlations between the pressure and the geometrical shapes in physics simulation. Furthermore, we construct a virtual hand consisting of one rigid palm and four HPFs which is simulated with Bullet Physics Engine. By changing the pressure of the corresponding honeycomb units of each finger, the hand can grasp a ball smoothly and lift it up. At last, the deviation between the mathematical analysis and the physical simulation is discussed.