2022/02/14 by Dimuthu D. K. Arachchige, Arachchige, Dimuthu D. K., Isuru S. Godage +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Sensor and Energy Harvesting Materials #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Micro and Nano Robotics #Robotics (cs.RO) #Soft Robotics and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2202.06605
openalex publication_date 2022/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this work, inspired by spider monkeys' tails, we propose a hybrid soft robot (HSR) design. We detail the design objectives and methodology to improve the controllable stiffness range and achieve independent stiffness and shape control. We extend the curve parametric approach to We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed HSR has about a 100% stiffness range increase than a previous soft robot design with identical physical dimensions. In addition, we empirically map HSR's bending shape-pressure-stiffness and present an application example - a soft robotic gripper - to demonstrate the decoupled nature of stiffness and shape variations. Experimental results show that proposed HSR can be successfully used in applications where independent stiffness and shape control is desired.