Development of Slender Giacometti Arm made of lightweight frame and thin artificial muscles

Abstract

In this research, we developed “Slender Giacometti Arm” that is a long, light, and slenderer manipulator than any other previous research. The distinctive feature of the robot arm is that it is made of balsa woods and thin pneumatic McKibben artificial muscles for reducing the robot arm's weight. The reasons why the material and the actuator are used are their lightness, high specific modulus of balsa wood, and high generated-force-to-weight ratio of the artificial muscle. Specifically, we built the design method of the robot arm after deriving some design equations. Besides, we made 5 segments Slender Giacometti Arm based on the method, and did experiments of it for proving the validity of the design method.