Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 01, 2022 - June 04, 2022
Recently, soft growing robots have attracted great interest. They move with extension from their tip and making bending shape, and they can move in clutter environments. Many soft growing robots and our previous robot were composed of an inflatable structure. The stiffness models of a straight inflatable beam have already developed, but they are not enough for soft growing robots with an inflatable tube because they have some bending shapes. In this paper, we developed deformation models of a bending inflatable tube and compared them to the actual deformation of an inflatable tube. We confirmed that an inflatable tube bent around the pitch axis can be regard as a torsion spring and our deformation model agrees with experimental results. These models enable us to calculate the bending angle and the height that the robot can reach with pitch-axis bending.
