Soft Robots
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Soft Robots Cosimo Della Santina1,2 , Manuel G. Catalano3 , and Antonio Bicchi3,4 1 Cognitive Robotics Department, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands 2 Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center, Weßling, Germany 3 Soft Robotics for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy 4 Centro di Ricerca Enrico Piaggio, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Synonyms Compliant Robots; Elastically Actuated Robots; Flexible Robots
Definition Soft robots are robotic systems with purposefully designed compliant elements embedded into their mechanical structure.
Overview The physical characteristics of animals’ bodies are substantially different from those of classic robots. Elastic tendons, ligaments, and muscles
enable animals to robustly interact with the external world and perform dynamic tasks (Fig. 1). The function of elastic elements in natural bodies is discussed in Roberts and Azizi (2011) and summarized in Table 1. As opposed to natural bodies, the physical structure of traditional robots has generally been very stiff. This has reflected the preeminent design goal of accuracy and non-deformability under loads. In recent years, attention has shifted from heavy-industrial applications to human-centered and service-oriented goals . This produced in turn a shift in the design approach, from the traditional “design for accuracy, control for safety” to “design for safety, control for performance.” As part of the efforts to guarantee safety and comfort to humans co-existing with robots, the co-design of the physical and cognitive parts of a robot system was advanced, which made possible the advent of “soft robotics.” Inspired by the natural example, in soft robots elastic elements are purposefully introduced into their physical structure, to obtain “natural” motions which embody in the very morphology of the robot the intelligent principles of motor control in humans and animals. Two main branches exist in soft robotic research according to their main source of inspiration. The first type, inspired by the vertebrate muscle-skeletal system (Albu-Schäffer et al. 2008), typically has compliant elements in the actuation or in the transmission elements and is referred to as articulated soft robots. The other branch, inspired by invertebrates
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 M. H. Ang et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Robotics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_146-1
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Soft Robots
Soft Robots, Fig. 1 Compliance is ubiquitous in natural bodies and appears in disparate forms. The only rigid body part of an octopus (a) is its beak, which is about 1 inch wide, so that this invertebrate mollusk can squeeze in small crevices to prey. The compliant body of vertebrates such as humans (b) enables them to perform dynamic
motions with high resilience to impacts. Some vertebrates have continuously deformable parts, e.g., elephants (c) whose continuously deformable trunk (c) is dexterously used to reach and grasp objects placed in n
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