Development of soft continuum manipulator with pneumatic and tendon driven actuations

In this paper, a soft continuum manipulator is introduced. We tried to hybrid element technologies of soft robotics and traditional hard material based continuum robots. The soft continuum manipulator was composed of urethane rubber based soft and flexible modules. These modules gave the manipulator softness and adaptiveness. Additionally, the manipulator could be inflated with air pressure to change length and stiffness of the manipulator. Tendon driven mechanism, which is widely used for continuum robots and manipulators, was chosen as an actuating method for the soft continuum manipulator. 500 g of weight lifting tests was performed with this manipulator. Stiffness of the manipulator was varied with 69 kPa of air pressure while lifting the weight. The experiments showed feasibility of variable stiffness concept of this soft continuum manipulator.