Soft-robot designs are manifold, but only a few are publicly available. Often, these are only briefly described in their publications. This complicates reproduction, and hinders the reproducibility and comparability of research results. If the designs were uniform and open source, validating researched methods on real benchmark systems would be possible. To address this, we present two variants of a soft pneumatic robot with antagonistic bellows as open source. Starting from a semi-modular design with multiple cables and tubes routed through the robot body, the transition to a fully modular robot with integrated microvalves and serial communication is highlighted. Modularity in terms of stackability, actuation, and communication is achieved, which is the crucial requirement for building soft robots with many degrees of freedom and high dexterity for real-world tasks. Both systems are compared regarding their respective advantages and disadvantages. The robots' functionality is demonstrated in experiments on airtightness, gravitational influence, position control with mean tracking errors of <3 deg, and long-term operation of cast and printed bellows. All soft- and hardware files required for reproduction are provided.
翻译:软体机器人设计多种多样,但仅有少数是公开可用的。通常,这些设计只在论文中被简要描述,这增加了复现难度,并阻碍了研究结果的可重复性和可比性。若设计能实现统一且开源,则可在真实基准系统上验证所研究的方法。为此,我们提出了两种采用拮抗式波纹管结构的软体气动机器人开源方案。从通过机器人本体布设多根线缆与气管的半模块化设计出发,重点展示了向集成微阀与串行通信的全模块化机器人的过渡。实现了可堆叠性、驱动与通信层面的模块化,这是构建具有多自由度及高灵巧性以完成真实任务的关键要求。我们对比了两种系统的优劣,并通过气密性测试、重力影响分析、平均跟踪误差<3°的位置控制实验,以及铸造与3D打印波纹管的长期运行实验,验证了机器人功能。所有复现所需的软硬件文件均已提供。