Design of an Active Flexible Spine for Wall Climbing Robot Using Pneumatic Soft Actuators

作     者：Guangming Chen Tao Lin Gabriel Lodewijks Aihong Ji Guangming Chen;Tao Lin;Gabriel Lodewijks;Aihong Ji

作者机构：Lab of Locomotion Bioinspiration and Intelligent RobotsCollege of Mechanical and Electrical EngineeringNanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics29 Yudao StreetNanjing210016China School of EngineeringCollege of EngineeringScience&EnvironmentUniversity of NewcastleCallaghan CampusUniversity DriveCallaghanNSW2308Australia 

出 版 物：《Journal of Bionic Engineering》 (仿生工程学报（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2023年第20卷第2期

页      面：530-542页

核心收录：

学科分类：0831[工学-生物医学工程（可授工学、理学、医学学位）] 0710[理学-生物学] 1002[医学-临床医学] 08[工学] 080202[工学-机械电子工程] 0805[工学-材料科学与工程（可授工学、理学学位）] 0802[工学-机械工程] 0836[工学-生物工程] 0811[工学-控制科学与工程] 

基　　金：the Foundation Research Project of Jiangsu Province Natural Science Fund(No.BK20190415). 

主　　题：Active spine Bionic design Soft robot Gecko locomotion Finite-element modeling 

摘      要：Wall climbing robots can be used to undertake missions in many unstructured environments.However,current wall climbing robots have mobility difficulties such as in the turning or accelarating.One of the main reasons for the limitations is the poor flexibility of the spines.Soft robotic technology can actively enable structure deformation and stiffness varations,which provides a solution for the design of active flexible spines.This research utilizes pneumatic soft actuators to design a flexible spine with the abilities of actively bending and twisting by each joint.Using bending and torsion moment equilibriums,respectively,from air pressure to material deformations,the bending and twisting models for a single actuator with respect to different pressure are obtained.The theoretical models are verified by finite-element method simulations and experimental tests.In addition,the bending and twisiting motions of single joint and whole spine are analytically modeled.The results show that the bionic spine can perform desired deformations in accordance with the applied pressure on specified chambers.The variations of the stiffness are also numerically assessed.Finally,the effectiveness of the bionic flexible spine for actively producing sequenced motions as biological spine is experimentally validated.This work demonstrated that the peneumatic spine is potential to improve the spine flexibility of wall climbing robot.